


The Boys Time Can't Capture

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: A band is like a fairy tale, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Band History, Bisexuality, Bisexuals Exist, Canon Compliant, Changelings, Fix-It, Hiatus, Inspired by Real Events, Love at First Song, M/M, Magic, Mental Health Issues, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Pete Wentz's Suicide Attempt (Best Buy Incident), Peterick, Pre-hiatus, Slow Burn, Touring is like faerie court, Tryst Theory, Unseelie Court, Urban Fantasy, Van Days, Warped Tour, You will also learn about faeries, You will learn some real facts about FOB and their actual history if u read this, canon based, fairy tale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-08-10 00:30:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 74,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7823206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being in a band is like being in a faerie tale. Only Pete knows it.</p><p> <i>Mostly accurate history of the band. Except Pete's in a fairy tale, and he'll do anything to get out and be with Patrick.</i></p><p>Gorgeous preview art by the even lovelier asteriel here: http://astershowers.tumblr.com/post/155964237104/his-whole-life-til-now-hes-been-running-around</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. You Can Thank Your Lucky Stars That Everything I Wish For Will Never Come True

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and welcome back. IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN. This will be written more slowly than my last runaway train of a fic; I'm aiming to update about once a week. No matter what I do it keeps coming out sad, so be warned, ye who enter here. (It is a fairy tale, though. And we all know what words those usually end with...) I hope you like it! (Also, if anyone wants to shout at length about how bands are exactly like fairy tales, THAT IS THE WHOLE REASON I EXIST.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amazing fanart by the truly talented [Asteriel](http://archiveofourown.org/users/asteriel/pseuds/asteriel)!  
> 

 

The sound of Patrick Stump singing unlocks Pete like a key every time he hears it, but especially the first time. The first time, Pete changes at all once, his internal tumblers sudden falling into place. It is the first time he’s ever been aligned. It’s the first time he even realizes he has a heart, that it can open.

His whole life til now, he’s been running around spending himself like a tin coin, like nothing matters but the music that maybe makes you feel alive, for a breath or two, if you mean it hard enough. Everything he’s ever gotten he’s burned up—saving nothing for the way back. He’s never planned on a return journey, never held any of himself in reserve. He’s always figured he’ll burn up in atmo, and god, it will be worth it for the two painful seconds he gets to see stars, gets to feel heaven on his face.

Patrick’s voice. Shy, uncertain, embarrassed of its own world-rocking fullness. Can’t hide sound like that under a hat, though the kid looks like he’d like to. Patrick’s voice makes Pete wish there was _more_ of him, when usually he’s fighting so hard to pare away, give away, ruin any part that feels too heavy, feels unnecessary for the next five’s minute’s survival. Pete hears that voice and wishes there were more of him, so he could give it all to Patrick. Patrick’s voice makes him stand still and just _listen_. Pete has never been still before, not even for the length of a heartbeat.

He learns all at once that he would stand still and just listen for as long as Patrick let him, for as long as time ran on, and for longer still. While the universe peeled away around them like onion skin, he’d still stand here, still, listening.

This is the effect of Patrick’s voice. Not just the first time: every time.

“Uh, I’m not a singer though,” says Patrick when he finishes. He is sixteen years old and shining gold. Pete knows _exactly_ what he is. No one this pretty, this gifted, this _pure_ in untouched by magic. Also no actual human would think that outfit was a good idea. Patrick, Pete is convinced, is a faerie.

“Yes you are,” Pete assures him. “We’ll be a band, and you’ll sing in it.” _And I’ll listen to you every day until the sun burns out._

*

Turns out Pete is right. Patrick is a singer and they are a band. People come to the shows, sing along to their songs. Right from the start, they develop a solid knot of fans, kids who learn the words, kids who ask them to play at their houses, in their basements, for their birthday parties. Pete’s been in a lot of bands; this isn’t the usual trajectory. They’re something special. Patrick’s something special.

More proof, Pete thinks, that Patrick is a faerie. Seelie Court, must be: Patrick is so obviously a creature of sunshine and kindness. A charming boy capable of being terrible, the speed of whose temper is matched by his rapidly accelerating fists, who shouts and fights his way out of problems if kindness fails him—this is Patrick. He is not terribly patient. He is easy to annoy and quick to forgive, meaning Pete gets a lot of amusement out of annoying him with no consequences more severe than the occasional bruise. The thing that distinguishes Patrick is not that he is _effortlessly_ golden and kind. It is how hard he works at it. How he chooses, again and again, to turn his face into the light, to stand in the sun, to be good and thoughtful and say nice things about everyone. If that isn’t a type of magic, Pete doesn’t know what is.

If it’s not Patrick’s voice pied-pipering people to their shows with its rich, rolling tones of obvious glamour, Pete cannot explain why suddenly people are showing up and listening. His songs aren’t that good. Joe agrees: it’s inexplicable. It must be Patrick. This kid is a secret weapon. This kid is a golden ticket. This kid—this kid is pure enchantment.

The first time he kisses Patrick is like this: they have just played their first-ever show in a cafeteria at DePaul. It has not gone especially well. “We don’t have a name, we don’t have any good songs, and we suck live,” Patrick says as they’re breaking down their equipment and loading it into the van. “We suck, actually, overall. I’m out, guys.”

This is unacceptable to Pete for _so many reasons_ , he doesn’t know where to start. He does know, though, that kisses are a kind of contract, that true names compel the fae, and that if this really is his first, last, and only show with Patrick Stump, he doesn’t want to miss his chance to taste that voice. The sound of Patrick’s golden tongue unlocks Pete like a key; imagine what the feel of it might do to him.

Joe stomps back into the building to get another load of equipment. Patrick moves to follow him. Pete puts himself in Patrick’s way. Right away, this kid’s famous temper starts rising. You can see it happening. It starts at the tips of his ears. Pete grabs the collar of Patrick’s jacket and shoves him up against the side of the van. He still hasn’t decided if he’s going in with his fist or his face first when his mouth crashes against Patrick’s, fast and violent. The kiss is a collision, occurring in slow motion, over as quickly as a car crash.

“Patrick Martin Stump,” Pete says into Patrick’s ear, his lips up against it, his chin brushing the cold metal side of the van. His breath comes hard. Patrick smells like sweat and soap and this slightly intoxicating salt-and-skin sun-warmed scent, something that has no business clinging to anyone’s skin in the early Illinois winter. Pete thinks this must be the smell of a Seelie faerie: the sun always shines on them. They never act in shadow. Pete wonders what his own skin smells like—bloodshed and secrets and rust, maybe. He’s glad he can’t smell it.

Patrick shoves Pete off of him as hard as he can. Pete stumbles, trips on his own feet, sprawls backward on his ass. He scrapes his cold palms on the rough parking lot asphalt. He’ll smell like iron now, if he didn’t before. “You’re an _asshole_ ,” Patrick spits. His whole face is red and sharp with anger. Pete had no idea this was such a major line, but he definitely fucking crossed it. “You don’t get to _touch_ me, I’m not _yours_.”

Pete holds up his bleeding palms, maybe to say _stand down, I’m wounded_ , maybe as an offering. “Don’t quit the band,” he says. It’s all he meant. It’s—that’s what he was trying to accomplish, with their mouths. Kisses are oaths and names are binding. Pete doesn’t know much magic but he knows kisses and names. “We’ll get better. We’ll get a real drummer. We’ll write more songs.”

“You’re supposed to be this, like, Chicago hardcore celebrity. That’s the only reason I agreed to _any_ of this,” Patrick says accusingly.

“I’ll make us big,” Pete promises. He will say anything to make Patrick stay. He spent 21 years in a world without Patrick’s voice in it. He doesn’t like who he was, in that world. He doesn’t like the things he did. He can’t lose this. He _won’t_ lose this. He thinks about his stinging palms, his bright blood, anything but the feel of Patrick’s lips. “This is our shot. You’ll see. I’ll give the world to you.”

“Fine. But if you ever do— _that_ —again, I’m out.” Pete says nothing. “Pete? I’m fucking _out_.”

“Okay! I heard you, dude.” Pete is careful to make no promises. Pete is careful to keep himself out of situations, conversations where he might be compelled to speak uncomfortable truths.

The second time Pete kisses Patrick is like this:

They’re in Joe’s amazingly shitty van, halfway through a tiny, abbreviated tour that so far has been mostly cancelled and incredibly unpaid: two weeks, ten shows, three states. Then they have to scurry back home; Christmas break is ending and there’s school on Monday. The only reason the band has lasted this long is because no matter how many times someone says they’ve quit, Joe still shows up at their house and hauls their ass to band practice.

Pete is poking Patrick in the side with his bare foot. Patrick has his hat over his eyes, his arms crossed over his chest, doing a poor job of faking sleep. Pete knows when Patrick’s ignoring him versus when Patrick’s actually sleeping, even though they’ve only been in a band together for a handful of months. His shoulders get all rigid when he’s annoyed. A tendon stands out in his neck. Pete always gets the wild urge to kiss it smooth again. Pete has been trying so, so hard to be good, but he does not for one second believe he will always be successful at resisting. Historically, resisting is… not Pete’s best thing.

Anyway, this is the situation. Everyone is crabby, they haven’t slept more than two hours a night in the last week, and they’ve been showering in gas station sinks. No one smells good. No one is totally sure where they will get the money to fill the van with gas when this tank is gone. Pete has been aggressively trying to get them more shows. He has been negotiating a lot of deals that end up with them getting paid in pizza. There’s no telling how well the van will run if they stuff pizza in the gas tank, but honestly it’s hard to imagine it could possibly run _worse_.

This is the situation, and then they are fishtailing off the road. Everything is too fast, happening very slow. Pete’s face slams into the side of the van, his cheek opening in a cut. Then the van is flying sideways into a tree and Pete is thrown like a ragdoll in the other direction, his body smashing into Patrick’s. There is broken glass in the air from an unknown source. For a second that lasts a lifetime, it seems like they all might die.

The second tree they hit absorbs enough momentum that the van scrapes, slides, shrieks to a crumpled halt. Joe, the driver, is hollering. Patrick is clutching Pete in terror. His eyes are huge and white, the eyes of a prey animal. Pete can’t stop himself, not this time. His mouth is on Patrick’s mouth. Instead of pushing him away, Patrick pulls him closer, kisses him back. It is a frantic, near-death kiss. It is a _if we had died just now I would have died without getting to do this, and that is not a risk I am willing to take_ kiss. Pete’s blood gets on Patrick’s face. Patrick’s tongue is in Pete’s mouth. There is an entire universe of longing contained in this one kiss.

“Is everyone okay?” Joe is screaming. Patrick slips away from Pete’s mouth, away from Pete’s arms. He curls himself into a small, shaky ball. “I’m okay,” he says. He won’t look at Pete.

Pete extricates himself from Patrick, who he’s still wrapped around protectively, like he’ll be the one to absorb the shock and the glass and the twisted screaming metal and the death, if it comes to that. He will put himself between Patrick and any kind of ending, every time. “I’m okay too,” he says. He swipes at the blood on his face with the sleeve of his hoodie. It shines a little too silver in the limited light of the moon. He hopes everyone is too shaken up to look very closely. He’s no good at mending cuts, only making them. He has no choice but to let it flow.

The van won’t start again. They trudge on foot through the snow, seeking civilization. Patrick walks up ahead of Pete, his arms hugged around himself. He glances back at Pete from time to time, looking mad as hell. Looking confused. Pete hopes he didn’t fuck things up even more than he usually does. Pete’s never found a place in this world where he fit, where he belonged, until now. Until this kid.

Patrick feels like home to him. Pete will do _anything_ to keep that feeling.


	2. Hot To The Touch, Cold On The Inside

Pete Wentz finds out he is a changeling in the usual way.

Once upon a time, his parents brought a glowing, golden-skinned, curly-haired squalling baby boy home from the hospital. They fell instantly in love. They doted on this baby, they poured everything into him. They filled him up with their love until the tiny cup that he was overflowed; as he grew into a larger and larger cup, the outpouring of love continued overflowing. Their house was one of laughter, of happiness, of health.

It’s never wise, to be so happy. It’s always foolish. You never know whose eye you will attract, with such joy. Whose jealousy.

When that baby was three years old, the faeries took him. A noblewoman of the Unseelie Court wanted him, and just like that, the baby was hers. In its place they left a sloppy replacement, looking right but half-empty inside, because the appeal of human babies was, of course, that they were so much fuller and sweeter and happier than infants among the fae. The appeal of human babies was that the fae did not understand them; so naturally they could not quite make a convincing fake.

But who in the human world would ever believe a baby was a forgery? No one believed in magic. No one believed in toddlers wearing the right face but smelling just slightly too earthy, who cried at things that never used to scare them, who looked the same but felt somehow _wrong_.

No one believed Pete’s mother, when she said her baby had been taken. When she rejected the changeling, insisted it wasn’t _her_ Pete. No one believed her and, concerned, Pete’s father pushed her into therapy. Words like “post-partum depression” were used. With therapy she cried less, it was true, but no amount of psychotropic medication could mask her growing coldness, her detachment, her disinterest in Pete. In the boy everyone insisted was, but she knew was not, Pete. She didn’t even like to touch him. By the time she had her second child and started smiling again, such a chill had settled over the little house that no faerie would ever be tempted.

It didn’t help that the new Pete was difficult. He was often sullen, cried easily, was made sick by long car rides and trips to the city, broke out in rashes if he played with anything metal. His smiles split the sky in two and made the full fury of the sun beam out from within, but this was difficult too, because it was _so much_. Too much and not enough all at once. He was unpredictable. He was inconvenient. He didn’t quite fit.

It was no one’s fault. But things feel easier, if you find someone to blame.

When he is eleven years old, Pete is crying on the back stoop, trying to silence his sniffles. He got into a fight at school. He isn’t even sure how it happened. Some jerk was teasing him—maybe he smelled wrong, because sometimes it’s like the other kids can just _tell_ —and Pete started name-calling back, and then the kid tripped, fell down a flight of stairs, broke his arm. Pete swore up and down that he didn’t push him, but no one else was even near the bully when it happened. The bully and his cronies all said it was Pete. The bully, white-faced with pain, pointed at Pete and hurled the words, “ _I felt his freak hands on my back! I know it was him!”_ and that was that. Pete had a record. Scuffles, mysterious disappearances, back-talking, peculiar behavior, unsettling homework assignments. No one believed him.

His parents didn’t believe him either. “ _Why can’t you just be a normal boy?”_ his mother shouted. “ _How can he just stand there and lie to us, Peter? How can you take his side? I will not tolerate lying in my house! I will not!”_

His parents kept arguing, their voices getting louder. It was always worse when his dad took his side. He could tell his dad didn’t believe him either, just wanted his mom to be nicer about it. His mom had never forgiven his dad for thinking she was crazy when she started insisting Pete was _wrong_.

Eleven years old, crying, rubbing his hands up and down his bare arms against the chill and staring into the tangle of trees behind his house, Pete believes it. Pete _feels_ it, just like his mom did. He doesn’t know how, he doesn’t know why, but he knows he doesn’t quite fit in the world. Weird things happen around him, to him. Some people are attracted to him like he’s honey—weird kids, mostly—and other people are unsettled, creeped out, inexplicably repelled. He always says what he means, even when he knows it’s better not to. He can’t make the words he’s supposed to say come out of his mouth.

Between his own not-quite-muffled crying and the yelling inside the house, Pete doesn’t hear the knight approaching. One minute he’s alone under the flickering porch light, the next there is a tall, black-skinned, willow-limbed person standing before him in oaken armor. The person has brilliant white hair, pointed white teeth, and clear amber eyes just exactly the color of Pete’s, except hers have no pupil. She has earrings in her long, pointed ears, the metal of which look like it’s burning red-hot.  On her hip, she wears an enormous, ornate sword. It’s taller than Pete and is making a faint humming sound.

She spits on the earth at Pete’s feet. Her spit is black like tar, and when it hits the ground, it sizzles. “Stop crying, whelp,” she says. Her voice is hard. “Queen Eloissine bids you serve at her table.”

Pete does stop crying, out of sheer surprise. “Who? What?”

His special gift for setting people on edge works with the knight, too. She grits her teeth and tightens the grip of one hand around the hilt of her sword. “Always sending me to deal with the young ones,” she mutters to herself. “Gods and queens, I hate the young ones.” To Pete, she says, “Is this the first time you’ve been called?”

“There’s never been an elven warrior at my house before, if that’s what you mean,” says Pete.

The knight scowls mightily and spits again. “Not an elf,” she snarls. “Like I haven’t heard that a thousand times since you brats started watching _Willow_.”

“Read it in _The Hobbit_ ,” Pete mumbles.

The knight lets out a long-suffering sigh, kneels down so she’s eye level with Pete, and says, “Okay. Tonight is the autumnal equinox, which is sacrosanct in our court. Your court. The Unseelie Court. The autumnal equinox marks the submission of the sun to the moon, the beginning of Unseelie rule. Tonight we drag the golden ones, the Seelie, out from their halls by their fair fuckin’ hair and revel, for the Hill is ours until the winter solstice. Do you understand?”

Pete bites his lip so hard it draws blood. All he can think is how he doesn’t want to disappoint someone else, even if she is a scary elf knight. But he can’t lie. He has never been able to make anything come out of his mouth but the truth. That has had a lot to do with establishing his record as unruly, poorly controlled, and difficult. “No.”

The knight sighs again. “Tonight there’s a party, because our side is back in charge. Our Queen, the one we both owe our fealty to, wants you there. You’ll pour her wine and serve her food. It won’t be hard, unless you are stupid. Unless you make a mistake. Then it will be very hard.”

“I didn’t know I was on a side,” says Pete.

The knight starts letting out a long string of words like cursing, but as far as Pete can tell, she’s just saying the names of plants. “Oak and thistle, sodding milkweed, foxglove and tansy! No one’s explained it to you?”

Pete shakes his head mutely. He doesn’t even know what is supposed to be explained.

“You’re a changeling, whelp. A faerie child.” She sounds sorry. It is the kindest her voice has been so far. “Those people in there—they aren’t your family. Their boy, their real boy, was taken from them. They got you instead.”

Pete had been surprised right out of crying, but tears spring back to his eyes, hot and urgent. “They are too my family,” he says, but something about what the knight is saying makes him wonder. _Their real boy was taken from them._ Isn’t that what his mom says, sometimes, when she doesn’t know he can hear her? Sometimes Pete can hear things that are being said three rooms over, three houses over, even if the person is whispering. It’s always about him. He doesn’t mean to snoop.

The knight claps a hand to Pete’s shoulder. The weight of her arm is heavy, almost more than he can support. He buckles slightly. “No, lad. They’re not. Come with me, and I’ll show you where you really came from.”

Pete looks back over his shoulder at the inexpressive screen door, like maybe it will tell him to stay. Inside, his parents are still arguing. Suddenly, he has the cold, clear conviction that they won’t miss him. That it would be easier for them, if he left. “I can come back?” he asks, double-checking. He wants to come back.

“With dawn’s first light.”

Pete goes with her.

*

He’s never seen anything like the Unseelie Court. The knight—Sir Nassara, she says he can call her—leads him through the woods, across a stream, across the highway. The hill is behind a shopping mall. It’s sweeping, covered in tall grasses and flowers, looking like any other hill. Pete has taken his sled here in the winter before. He never thought he was sledding on anything special.

Nassara opens a door in the hill and leads him inside.

A twisting warren of tunnels, lit by crystal wall sconces and crooked chandeliers, takes them down a path he’ll never remember to the center of the hill. They pass many closed doors on their way. The doors are made of wood, their handles and fittings made of gemstones and glass. There is no metal anywhere. Nassara’s pierced ear smokes, a little. Pete doesn’t dare ask if it hurts.

At last they come to a cavernous ballroom. The floor is tiled in a glittering mosaic, gold and black; Pete can’t make out the design. There are too many… _creatures_ on it. Elves, faeries, imps, trolls, selkies, nypmhs, druids, witches, dwarves, things with too many legs that he doesn’t think have names, things that look like ghosts that got blood spilled on them, things that look like sharks that crawled up out of the sea and discovered they had legs. Everything is wonderful and everything is cruel.

It answers a call emanating out from his chest, one he never noticed before. It mirrors the twisting smoke where his heart should be. It feels scary, like fate.

They all smile at him, but not like they’re happy to see him. They smile like he might be amusing, or delicious, or less boring than the rest of the room. They smile like he will only briefly be anything. There is music, wheezing, sawing, rough; there are tables groaning under the weight of vibrant heaps of unrecognizable food; there is dancing. The walls are decorated with things that glitter, like teeth, diamonds, wet organs, spiderwebs dotted with dew, scalps, candles.

There are many knights, all in armor like Nassara’s: oak scarred by lightning, petrified. Black. They all have swords like Nassara’s: matte iron with an ornate ricasso of leather, wood, and bone. No one would ever bully him again, Pete thinks, if he had a sword like that. He likes the way they all match: like they belong to something. Like they belong to each other.

The crowd of merrymakers parts, making way for Nassara. She strides across the mosaic towards a dais, upon which sits a great throne of black and gold. It does not look comfortable. To either side of the throne, there is a frosted glass chair. Next to each chair stands a knight.

Sitting in these three seats are most terrible things Pete has ever laid eyes on.

In the middle, there is a woman. The sight of her makes Pete’s knees bend, wanting to kneel. She is so beautiful he wants to cry out. He wants to look away. She is beautiful like broken glass. She is beautiful like the amazing fragility of blood within skin. She is beautiful like your last breath, like gasoline catching the light in a parking lot, like the first drag on a cigarette. She is beautiful in a way an eleven year old can’t comprehend or describe.

She is terrible, too.

She is sprawled across the throne, her legs thrown up over one of the arms. She is dressed all in armor, only hers is barbed black metal, inlaid with gold. Her pale, diaphanous skin shines with ruby-red blisters where the armor touches her. A few of them leak silver-tinged blood. Her lips are edged in purple, bleeding to yellow—her mouth a plum. Her eyes are like an exaggerated version of Pete’s, of Nassara’s: they are so copper they glow, throwing off light of their own. Her dark hair is cut close to her scalp, its alert buzz shining like an oil slick. On her brow there is a circlet of dead branches. She wears opals from her ears and at her throat. She smiles like a skeleton, her face too thin, her cheekbones implausible knives. All her teeth are silver. All her teeth are sharp.

To her left, there is a monster. It oozes blackly off its chair. Pete doesn’t know if it’s worse when it looks like a horrible living blob or when you can glimpse a human shape inside it. A hand shooting out, grasping air, from its midsection, then melting back in. Three distinct ankles sticking out from different sides. For a horrible second, he thinks he sees a face, pushing through the ooze. He feels sure if he sees whatever is inside, whatever the sack of goo contains, it will be the last thing he sees. He looks away quickly.

To her right, there is a very old man. He looks like he died long ago. His bones have ossified into ridges and knots, growing like tree roots, sticking out of his skin. His face and beard are mossy. His clothes are stained, greasy, tattered. Pete thinks he’s dead until he hears the painful, choking wheeze of the man’s breath. Slower than a nightmare, the old man’s head turns to face Pete. He has no eyes. Pete will have nightmares about the ingrown fingernails of his terrible hands.

Nassara drops to her knee in front of him, and Pete forces himself to take two steps closer, to draw even with the knight. He doesn’t want to be too far from her. He kneels too, and is grateful to bow his head.

“Did you bring me a new pet, Sir Nassara?” The voice of the Queen—because who else could the woman be but the Queen—rolls out sweet as a poison. It would be better if her voice grated, if she spoke rusty nails. This voice, Pete wants to listen to forever.

“The whelp you asked for, Your Majesty.” Nassara addresses the floor.

“Rise, boy,” says the Queen. Pete’s knees unbend without his permission. She snaps her fingers and his chin lifts. His eyes meet hers, and he’s falling. He’s falling into her. There is no light in the world but her eyes.

“I own your true name,” says the Queen. “What do the humans call you?” She says _humans_ the same way Nassara listed plant names: like it’s the foulest word she knows.

“My name is Pete,” Pete says.

“Well, Pete, tonight you will fill my cup for me, and do whatever else I require of you. You will sit by my side at the feast and tell me about the last seven years, since we left you. You will tell me your dreams and your nightmares and I will do my best to make them all come true.”

“And then I can go home?” Pete doesn’t mean to ask, but the words come out.

The Queen’s thin eyebrows climb up her pale forehead. She swings her legs to the ground; her pointed armored boots thunder against the mosaic, cracking one fragile tile. “You are home now,” she says. Her voice stays velvet, but Pete feels like the words are a threat. “If you are very, very good, one day when you’re older, I will make you into a knight.” She leans forward, grabs his chin in her hand. Pete notices how good she smells, sweet like decay. He is too young to wonder why that smells good to him. “If you are bad, Pete, my love, I will kill you.”

*

The night he learned he was a changeling was Pete’s first visit to the Unseelie Court, but not the last. Always blunt, honest, reckless, he didn’t do well there. This pleased Queen Eloissine, whose penchant for cruelty was not so much a streak as her defining characteristic. She made him kneel, the first night, and speak the words of his binding. He might walk in the human world, but he owed allegiance to her. When she sent for him, he must come. What she asked of him, he must do. If he failed her, he would die. Things were simple that way, in the Court.

Pete grows up fucked-up, broken-open, never belonging anywhere. He knows things no one else would even believe, knows magic exists in the world, can even do some himself—but it doesn’t comfort him. The Court he serves, the faeries he knows, the only people who know who he is and why, even when he’s all wrong, he’s doing his best: they aren’t light and beautiful and whimsical, like the stories. They are brutal, bloody, and cruel. So is he: after all, he’s one of them. And doesn’t he enjoy the things Queen Eloissine makes him do?

He gets in fights. He breaks the rules. He skips school to go on faerie quests, or bloody the faces of the heroes who get sent on them instead. From September to December, from March to June, the realm belongs to the Unseelie Court, his court, and they wreak their terrible revels both under the Hill and in the mortal world. The other months, the months belonging to the Seelie, they do what they can to harry and spoil the plots and parties of the gold ones. Everyone is always trying to grab more power. Everyone wants more than their fair share of the seasons, of the year. Lives are lost over this. Immortality is boring, if you aren’t constantly upping the stakes.

Pete has never seen the Seelie queen, but Nassara promises that just the sight of her would make him ill, that’s how happy she is, how beautiful. Nassara is his friend, sort of. Either that or she hates him. It is hard to tell with the fae. Pete doesn’t want to ask, because he knows she can’t lie.

Pete gets sent to boot camp. There, in the territory of a different faerie court, no one sends him on Unseelie errands; no monsters drag him out of his bed at midnight; no knights duel to last blood under the hill for the Queen’s amusement; no lesser Seelie fae beg him for mercy as his fists rain down. He lives a normal life.

Or would, if Pete himself was normal. But he is fae at the core of him. He makes a messy human. After a few months, he gets sick. None of the local doctors know what to do with him: he keeps coughing up mud and leaves. His skin starts coming off, handfuls sloughing away like raw dough. This scares him: he does not want to see what’s underneath. He gets sent home. By the time they take him to his regular doctor, the symptoms are gone.

When Pete is 18, he kneels at Eloissine’s feet and asks her to make him a knight. He has been a loyal courtier for seven years. Fae like sevens; he figures she can’t possibly say no. He’s never imagined himself growing up, never imagined himself living to 18, let alone beyond it. He doesn’t know what to be but a knight. He’s a shit human. He’d like nothing more than to leave the human world and live as a faerie, even a dark one. He’ll sit under the hill all day and gorge on sweet-rotten jewel-colored fruits, he’ll whittle animal skulls with a stinging iron knife as a hobby, he’ll pull the wings off smaller things when he gets bored. He’ll drink faerie wine and feel nothing. He’ll swing his sword in whatever direction he’s pointed.

But the terrible queen dismisses him, saying, “You are soft. You smell of daylight, of human flesh. Prove to me you are truly Unseelie, changeling, and I will make you my knight.”

“How do I prove it?” bursts out of Pete. Rash, rash.

Eloissine raises one perfect, spidery brow. “For love of me, you will find a way,” she says.

When it starts, the music is… a way to survive. The songs of the Unseelie Court ring in his ears like homesickness, but he doesn’t live under the hill. He has one foot in each world and he’s not allowed to belong to either. He needs to hear songs of his own. He likes the way his fingertips blister and burn on the steel strings. He likes the way it’s almost like feeling. Later, being on stage, he doesn’t have to be anyone—doesn’t have to try to be the boy whose life he’d stolen, doesn’t have to try and prove he is Unseelie enough to be a knight. The music is for him, for _fun_ , because all the fae love music; the music is because he is young and ruthless and can’t lie; the music is because he believes his debts will never be collected, that he’ll outlive everyone he knows, that nothing matters. Pete will play for anyone, fight for anyone, go home with anyone. Anything to make his blood run warm. Anything to make him feel like he has a heart. He goes out with Nassara, he makes mayhem with the Unseelie knights. He cuts things open. He makes them bleed.

When Pete is 20, he writes a song for Eloissine, plays it at Midsummer as the sun comes up, when they are preparing to battle—when they are waiting for the Seelie to descend and burn them from the Hill. As the fight breaks out around them, Eloissine pulls a sword out of the first-fallen fae and makes him a knight.

It is everything he’s ever wanted.

When Pete is 21, he hears Patrick Stump play Through Being Cool for the first time, and he wants something else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> .................please tell me what you think. I am super shy about this story.


	3. Be Careful Making Wishes In The Dark

Pete’s on his knees in front of the faerie queen of the Unseelie Court and he’s saying, “Please. Please release me from your service. There is nothing I will not give. There is nothing I will not do. You have to let me go. I need this.”

Pete has never been good at faerie court. He’s always been reckless. He’s never been cunning or coy, no matter how cleverly he casts lyrics. This is his heart: wicked, wormy, studded with beetle-black seeds. He wears it on the outside to prove the world wrong. Things like him, they aren’t meant to have hearts. Pete believed this up until the moment he heard Patrick Stump sing, up until the moment something in his chest twitched to life, began to beat. It’s only half a heart and it’s not much good, doesn’t work or mark time or love like it should. He offers it anyway. It’s all he’s got.

Queen Eloissine has a blacker look than usual on her pointed, perfect face. Her face is a symmetry you could get lost in, an unattainable cruelty that could drive you mad. That’s the point, Pete thinks. She prefers her courtiers crazy. They’re more interesting that way.

“I’ve never heard you beg before, Peter,” says the Queen. “I find I like the sound.”

“Please,” says Pete. “Just tell me what to do. How do I win my freedom?”

“I would prefer to keep you.” Eloissine’s voice is mild but the assembled knights—his _fellow_ knights, though Pete does not feel much like one of them today—stiffen through the shoulders, fit hands to sword hilts. Pete tries to catch the eye of the knights he has gone adventuring with, the knights he has numbered among his friends, insofar as there are friends among the Unseelie Court.

None of them will look at him. The horrors seated on either side of the Queen shift and groan.

“There is someone in this world more beautiful than you,” Pete hears himself saying. “There is something in this world I can love, not just bow to in fear confused with longing. I want—I want a shot at that. If I ruin it, you can have me back.”

“You wish to give yourself to another? A _mortal_?” Eloissine’s voice is sharp. She discards the ruby-choked dagger she had been toying with idly. “What a foolish thing to say, Peter.”

“And are we surprised to find that I’m a fucking fool?” Pete snaps. The assembled Court rustles and murmurs at his outburst. “Your Majesty,” he amends quickly.

“Though it pains me, Pete, you who have always been a child of my heart—though it pains me, I will let you go. To see you suffer—oh, I can hardly stand it,” says the Queen. Her words are black, her face blacker. They all know she can stand to see him suffering. They all know how she relishes suffering. Her friends know this better than her enemies, even.

Pete came here today half-expecting to be killed. He did not expect he would be granted what he’s asking for. He doesn’t know what to say. “What must I do?” he asks at last.

Never ask a faerie a question you don’t already know the answer to. If there is one thing it was crucial for Pete to learn from the fae in his decade of service to this court, _that was it_.

“Oh, it will be easy, dear one,” says Queen Eloissine horribly. “Only complete three simple tasks for me, and your life will be yours, to keep or to give or to spill.”

Three tasks, Pete’s thinking. That doesn’t sound too bad. She’ll want, what—tunics woven out of nettles? The heart of a rare beast? Another song? Pete hopes she doesn’t ask him to kill anything… human.

“What are the tasks?” he asks. Perilous Pete.

“For your first task… move a mountain.”

Pete stares blankly. “You want me to what?”

Eloissine is actually smirking. The Unseelie Court, with their endless potential for amusement, are chuckling behind their hands. Pete’s hands are in fists without his permission. Pete is ready to fight his way out, like always. But you can’t punch through the chess board to win the game.

“And then what? Conquer the heavens? Capture the moon?” It is unwise to be giving Eloissine ideas. Pete knows this. He just… he has spent a decade in her service. He never expected to want anything more than the approval of the creature before him, this twisted nightmare warrior queen. He never expected to want anything more than to belong to this Court—to _belong_. To belong anywhere. To have somewhere he fit.

He never expected anyone like Patrick Stump to exist in the world. Patrick opened his mouth to sing and suddenly, horribly, Pete knew he was wrong. Wrong for the world, wrong for the faeries, wrong for his family, and wrong for this kid. But he _wanted_ to be right for him. Pete has never felt like he could be right before.

Then, in the pocket of calm in the aftermath of a midnight car crash: Patrick kissed him back.

Pete made the wrong vow, when he kneeled before Eloissine and took her blade upon his shoulder. He swore himself to the only future he could imagine, but he only did it because never in ten lifetimes could he have imagined Patrick.

“First things first,” Queen Eloissine says. “Move mountains, then we’ll talk.”

*

Pete doesn’t know what else to do, so he gets a shovel. He starts digging.

There aren’t any mountains in the Chicago suburbs, in the whole state of Illinois, but faeries usually aren’t all that hung up on the literal interpretation of things. (Until they are, of course.)

He figures any old hill will do.

He pulls up all his anger: his anger at being a changeling in the first place, being forced on a family that he could never quite belong to; his anger at the Court for extracting promises he was too young and scared to comprehend; at Eloissine for her cruelty and the way he has always been drawn in by things that were cruel, the way he has loved and savored hurt, the way he has been taught to revile that which is good. Pete’s not done. He’s mad at being not-a-faerie, not-a-human, mad at being not-black, not-white, mad at being not-gay, not-straight, mad at every place, person, and institution where he didn’t quite fit. He’s mad at a life lived in-between. He’s mad that he kissed Patrick, he’s mad that Patrick kissed him back. He remembers what Eloissine commanded her knights to do to the family dog, when he loved it too much. He’s mad in advance about what they’ll do to Patrick, if Pete loves him too much. He’s mad and his anger burns so hot, so bright, it eclipses everything. He thinks, maybe, he won’t ever have to feel anything else at all. He’s mad at the Queen’s mockery, he’s mad at this task, and _he will bring their own hill down on their heads to show them_ how mad he can be. To show them he’s not theirs. Stupider than a faerie, bolder than a man. He pours this fire from his head into his muscles and bones. He drives the shovel into the earth, ripping up grass and roots and rocks and clay and oceans of dirt. He digs. With every anger he’s ever felt, with a whole life of not-quite-anything, Pete _digs_.

The moon is high in the sky and his hands are slick, bleeding, on the handle of the shovel when Nassara comes. He hasn’t moved the mountain yet, but he’s taken a good chunk out of it. He will punish anyplace that ever felt like home. He will destroy everything he was ever wrong about. He will burn down all of Faerie and find himself in a van with his three best friends, tired and smelly and zeroing in on peace.

“I understand why you’re angry,” Nassara says. Her voice is quiet, patient, stately as a fucking oak. Pete gives zero fucks. Pete is digging. Pete digs. “But this isn’t the way.”

“Grab a shovel and we’ll see,” Pete grunts. He does not look up from his task. He sweated through his shirt long ago, tore through his glamoured work gloves.

“She’s mad, if that’s what you wanted.”

Nassara doesn’t have to say, _The people you love aren’t safe when she’s mad._ Nassara doesn’t have to say, _I hope you’re willing to stake someone else’s life on your tantrum._

Pete doesn’t have to stop digging.

Nassara waits. She is capable of a magnitude of silence. Daylight is rising around the edges of the hill (which hasn’t yet gotten any smaller) when she sighs and gives up. “This is for your own good, you stubborn bastard,” she says, right before she clubs him on the back of the head with the big hilt of her giant sword.

Pete _does_ have to stop digging. Pete’s unconscious.

*

Pete spends the rest of the night and much of the next day hanging from the ceiling like a tree root, under the hill. He has been placed into the iron cage reserved for the fae who displease Eloissine. He wonders what the Seelie use it for. He’ll ask Patrick, he decides, if it turns out Patrick is a faerie. He doesn’t know how else Patrick could be singing like that—like he’s _solving_ something. Solving Pete. Like with one golden voice he can sing to the whole world, and create it in enough space for Pete to live. But he doesn’t know how to ask, either. _Patty, are you magical? Because you seem magical to me._ At best, it’s a bad pick-up line. At worst, he sounds crazy.

In his own way, Pete relishes the way the cage burns him. It keeps him awake, keeps him angry. He needs to move a mountain. Maybe he was thinking about it the wrong way, when he picked up a shovel. He’s not good with a shovel. You know what he _is_ good with?

He’s good with music. With stages. With a bass guitar.

If he’s going to complete an impossible task—this seems obvious now—it’s going to be with Patrick.

He just needs to think harder. Try harder.

Pete rolls up his sleeves and presses his arms against the bars, leans in to the searing hiss of his own skin. _Think._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think you see where this is going... <3 Thank you so much for reading! I am having a tremendous amount of fun writing it.
> 
> Next: Pete's free with his kisses, his lips the only thing he can spend himself, the only things that are his to give. Everybody's got warnings.


	4. The Only Thing You'll Get Is This Curse On Your Lips

They write more songs, record an album, get a better drummer, write another album in a fit of mania. Sometimes Pete feels like a conduit for pure creativity, something ideas just _flow_ through. Sometimes he stops sleeping, stops eating much of anything, and just writes and writes and writes, and still can’t get it out fast enough. It feels like burning. Feels like laughter bubbling through his veins, instead of slightly-too-silver changeling blood.

Convincing Andy to join the band is its own impossible task. When he finally agrees, Pete checks back with the Unseelie Court. (“I _basically_ moved a mountain,” he complains to Nassara after Eloissine laughs him out of the hill.) Andy’s known Pete longer than the others, doesn’t look at him with star-spangled eyes like Joe or Patrick do. Andy likes Pete, but Pete thinks he suspects something’s not quite above-board here. Pete is not going to be able to get away with much shit with Andy around. He treads as lightly as he’s able.

They tour aggressively. They sleep on floors and couches, in the van. They pile together on cold nights and kick each other away, sweaty and stripped down to underwear, on hot ones. They will play anywhere, with anyone, for anything. Pete promotes them endlessly, with his mouth and his fingertips, in person and through computer screens. He’s building a bridge of couches and tour dates, one that leads them further and further from the place that isn’t home, that keeps him out of reach of his foul obligations. Touring is like a faerie court of its own: the rules are different, time feels endless. Pete remakes himself so it’s like he’s only ever been a purposeful arrow down a highway to the next night, the next show.

He watches Patrick. He kisses Patrick on the neck, leans his head on his shoulder, crowds him with his body, hangs off of him at every opportunity. He does it during shows, mostly: part so Patrick can’t push him off, part so Patrick knows how real it is, how much Pete means it. On stage, where he doesn’t have to wear anyone else’s skin, where he isn’t trying to please anybody but himself. On stage, where he’s just Pete. He means it.

He also remembers that Patrick asked him not to. So he kisses Patrick’s neck and leans on Patrick’s shoulder on stage, so Patrick can pretend it doesn’t mean anything anywhere else, if he wants to. So Patrick can pick whether he wants another kiss that’s just them, in a van, terrified and wanting.

Pete watches very, very closely for a sign. For any sign.

Patrick blushes, mumbles, hits him, laughs, gets cranky, gets happy, writes good shit, writes terrible shit, tells Pete exactly what he thinks of his lyrics, his fashion sense, his morning breath. They share couches, they curl together in their sleep, and all the while Patrick betrays nothing. Patrick acts like Pete is just someone he tolerates. Patrick likes to say, “I only put up with you ‘cause you’re famous.” Pete’s pretty sure Patrick isn’t a faerie by now—Pete keeps tossing Patrick handfuls of coins or silverware or, once, a rusty railroad tie to check for flinching or burning—so he’s pretty sure that’s a lie. He’s pretty sure Patrick does like him. He’s pretty sure Patrick is his best friend. It’s not like with faeries. With Patrick, Pete can tell.

He thinks.

*

Pete kisses lots of people. He’s at least half heartless and his life burns close to the surface. He’s only ever lived as a mortal, doesn’t yet have the sense of his own immortality, but all the fae he has known have warned him of the way the people around him will gutter out like candles in a gusty knowe; if he blinks, he’ll miss them. If he waits, they’ll die. If there are mortal lips you would kiss, kiss quick, before they wither. Pete has taken this philosophy to heart.

Anyway, everyone gets crabby when they have to sleep in the van too many nights in a row, and there’s no money for hotels when Taco Bell is a luxury. It’s not like Pete wants to hook up with people he doesn’t especially want to be with right in front of someone he _does_ want to be with, but he also hasn’t looked around too hard for another option.

He is cheerfully following a cute boy in skinny jeans back to his car after a show, because the boy has invited him to make out and he hasn’t gotten any better offers, when Andy catches his arm and holds him in the back of the venue. It’s a small, sticky bar. The backstage area is narrow, dim, and choked with pipes. The air back here makes Pete a little sick. He can’t breathe so much iron.

“What are you doing, man?” Andy asks him.

Pete points at the receding back of the cute boy.

“How many cities do you need to score in? Just come hang out with us.”

“How many cities do I need to score us floors to sleep on in, you mean?” Pete’s voice has an edge to it already. He doesn’t enjoy being rebuked. He’s more stung than he wants to show that Andy has been watching and doesn’t think it’s okay. It’s not _every_ city. He hangs out with the guys most nights. They roughhouse and drink beer and throw each other in pools, when there’s a pool, and eat Doritos for dinner. He likes it; it’s fun; it’s a big part of the reason he wants to stay on the road, why he’s at home on the road.

It’s hard to be around Patrick so much and not fall in love with him. Pete’s already—well. He hasn’t moved any mountains yet. He’s not any closer to figuring out how. And even if he _had_ moved a mountain, leapt a skyscraper in a single bound, and completed whatever impossible third thing Eloissine is going to ask him to do—even if he’d done all that, would Patrick even care? There has been no sign that Patrick _wants_ to kiss Pete, aside from Patrick’s passive reception of Pete’s on-stage affection. So yes. It’s hard.

“Don’t do that,” Andy says. Andy is scowling like he can’t believe Pete. Andy has known Pete for long enough; Andy should believe anything of Pete by now. “Don’t act like you’re just taking one for the team. No one’s asking you to do it.”

“Well, is anyone asking me _not_ to?”

Andy lets him go. Andy holds his hands up, palms open, like he doesn’t want anything to do with Pete, like he’s washing his hands of the whole situation. “I just think you’re hurting a lot of people, and you’re probably one of them,” he says. He walks away.

Pete, though—Pete doesn’t follow cute skinny jeans after all. Pete hasn’t been hurting anyone. Pete has very specifically been not hurting anyone. He doesn’t understand what the hell Andy’s talking about. He follows Andy to tell him so. He follows Andy into the front of the bar, where the rest of his band is mingling with polite hardcore fans confused about their set and drinking Coke, which is all the bar will serve them, since half of them are underage. Pete is opening his mouth to ask Andy what exactly the fuck he was talking about when Patrick sees him.

Patrick’s whole face lights up in a grin. “Pete! You’re with us tonight?” he asks, sounding openly excited. (Are all the Seelie so foolish? In Eloissine’s court, you only wear your heart on your sleeve to signal that you want someone to eat you alive, that you fancy the way you look with bloody lips and blackened eyes. More evidence that Patrick cannot be a faerie. Surely, surely, Patrick has been lying—surely Patrick can lie.)

Pete gets it, then. He’s probably not hurting a lot of people, but that might not have been what Andy meant. Andy might have meant, you’re hurting one person.

They sleep in the van that night. It is not comfortable. Pete can’t sleep, too distracted by the beauty and sorrow of moonlight on Patrick’s pale skin. Eventually, he gives up trying, and paces around the outside of the van instead, trying to figure out how he’s supposed to move a mountain.

That’s where the warning finds him.

A solid black arrow whistles through the night and bites into the asphalt at his feet. Pete jumps a little too high in the air for someone beholden to mortal physics and lands with his heavy Unseelie sword sizzling in his hand.

The arrow crumbles into ash. A dark archer steps out from between two shadows. Pete has never seen her before, but he knows right away who sent her. She shines blue-black and feathered, a raven-woman with human lips and a necklace of beaks around her throat. Her leather armor arcs and swirls in peaks and patterns evocative of wings. She has her bow drawn, a second barbed arrow notched and aimed for Pete. Given what her first shot did to solid pavement, he’s not keen to find out what her second will do to him.

“I have a message for you,” she rumbles. Her voice is guttural and coarse. “Queen Eloissine wishes to remind you that you are a sworn man. Your affections are not free to give, your actions not your own to command. Queen Eloissine wishes to warn you that, should you grow of any one thing too fond, she will have no choice but to destroy it. She bade me tell you she is a jealous woman, and hopes you will give her no cause to exercise that jealousy.”

“So _everyone_ wants me to stop making out with randos after shows, is that what you’re saying?” Pete tries to speak like everything is a big joke to him, putting on the voice that makes him so insufferable to humans. He’s betting it will work on raven-folk too. You can never let a faerie see that you care about anything: they will either take it for themselves or find a way to hurt you with it.

“I am saying only what I was bidden to say,” says the raven stonily. “Has the message been received?”

Pete thinks about coming at her with his sword, just to see how fast she is. Just to see if he can take her. Just so he has something he can punch. Instead he nods. The raven-woman lowers her bow, spins on her heel, transmutes back into a raven, and flies away. A black feather drifts to earth in her wake; Pete pockets it. It’s never a bad idea to keep the calling card of a royal messenger.

How fucking prophetic, that this is the night everyone at once becomes concerned that he’ll hurt Patrick. Only, Andy thought he’d hurt Patrick by not caring enough. Pete’s the only one who knows that he could easily be deadly for Patrick, if he’s seen caring too much.

*

“I don’t think I want to be in this band,” Pete says. They’re living in a shitty apartment in Roscoe Park these days. Being so close to Patrick at all times is like being constantly electrocuted, and also liking it.

Pete is no closer to moving a mountain. He thinks he’s figured the task out by now: he isn’t meant to solve it. He knew from the minute she said it that Queen Eloissine was telling him to fuck himself, but it’s like he’s really started to perceive the _depth_ of the ‘fuck yourself’ she issued that day. He can’t even tour for more than a few months without having to stop at home, to be close to the hill and the Court, to refuel. He only missed one equinox, but he spent the whole day and night folded up in a bathroom retching. When his stomach was empty of food, blood and stones started coming out. His skin started fading, like it was going to come off again. The message was clear. You have to spend the holidays with your family, or your family is gonna be hella pissed. He’s been having nightmares about coming home to Patrick’s body feathered with raven arrows almost every night. Anyway, Patrick doesn’t need him. Patrick is a song-writing machine. The band will be okay without Pete. Better, possibly.

“You can’t leave!” Joe protests. “You are not fucking leaving,” Patrick says. Andy says nothing, because Pete decided it was better to do this when Andy wasn’t around. When Andy looks at Pete he sees him too clearly.

They don’t really talk about it. Pete just packs a bag and leaves. “I’m not going to fight about it,” he says. “I just can’t be here.”

He has to leave before he tells the truth. Before someone asks him a direct question, like _why are you doing this_ , before they get him so worked up he forgets to evade and just spews the stupid truth at them. The stupid truth is, Pete’s worried he’s going to get them killed. My Band Was Murdered By Faeries: not even the tabloids would buy that story.

That night, Patrick calls him at his parent’s house.

“This is bullshit,” Patrick says. “You don’t get to make me kind of like this band and then leave it. That’s not fair!”

“It almost sounds like you’re saying you kind of like _me_.”

“Why do you think I even joined this band, you asshole?”

“Did you used to doodle my name in the margins of your notebooks? Did you waste all your time daydreaming about the day you’d meet the great Pete Wentz? Did you come to all my shows and try to work up the courage to throw your underwear at the stage?” It’s easier to tease Patrick, to distract him with banter, than to find a way to twist the truth and not _quite_ lie about why he’s leaving.

“Yes, and imagine my disappointment when I finally did meet you, and you turned out to be you,” Patrick says dryly. Pete doesn’t actually need Patrick to say it. He’s been warmed all the way through by Patrick’s smiles, pummeled by Patrick’s vengeful fists, blown away by Patrick’s powerful voice and golden melodies. He knows Patrick likes him. No way he’d still be putting up with this shit if he didn’t.

Patrick says, “If you’re done, so am I. And then it’s all been for nothing.”

Pete doesn’t leave the band.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, so glad to be here with y'all. Up next: Warped '04.


	5. I'm Not Ready For A Handshake With Death, I'm Just Such A Happy Mess

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you like it, cats and kittens. I had so much fun writing it. I love this story.

Warped Tour, 2004. Everyone is pissed that they’re there, except for the band. The band is utterly ecstatic. The organizers are putting them on the smallest, shittiest stages, with the most awkward or undesirable show times, to try to appease everyone and their six brothers who think pop-punk isn’t _real_ music, that Fall Out Boy hasn’t worked hard enough to pay their dues. The weather is godawful, either a monsoon or a heatstroke and no in-between. None of it matters. They’re like kids at a carnival. Fucking _Warped Tour_. Pete has known magic is real since he was eleven and he still never would have believed this.

Their album has been exploding. Kids line up outside venues, flood the stage. Promoters start billing them as openers and having them close, because those kids will leave as soon as they’ve played. Pete is glad to be traveling, glad to be hitting the road at least briefly for Warped, because home is feeling less and less safe. He’s salted the thresholds and done all the shaky protection spells he can manage—digging most of them up on the internet, in weird library books, in dusty paperbacks buried on Holistic/Paranormal shelves in used bookstores. Even in the books that don’t quite take the whole thing seriously (looking at you, _Heal Your Life with Crystals_ ), there are certain rituals or words that throb off the page, that have a real charge. Pete does his best, anyway. Unseelie aren’t great at protective magic. Unseelie are knives, mostly just good for the one thing. He glamours the door to their apartment, adding one more layer of confusion that might only hold off Eloissine for the length of two breaths but sure throws food delivery guys for a fucking loop. Even two breaths might be enough time to throw a glamour over the guys so they look like armchairs, to get himself between whatever nasty’s at the door and Patrick.

It’s stressful, is the point. Pete knows he endangers them by living there. His magic, his strength, degrades quickly in the city. Loud, busy, metallic. He’s doing his best just keeping his head above water. The summons keep coming: dead leaves drifting to his feet with messages pricked into them with tiny needles, a swirl of oil spelling words in a gutter, a particular pattern of drops of blood when a paring knife slips and he bleeds over dinner. Eloissine knows he’s trying to hide, knows he’s been tilting at mountains, knows he wants out and knows _why_ , because he’s stupid and he told her. She sends him on increasingly unpleasant errands. Pete’s nightmares are getting even more violent. He’s getting a little Lady Macbeth about his hands. They don’t ever feel clean. The sunshine-and-green-grass smell of bright Seelie blood doesn’t quite come off them. He is indescribably relieved, all the ways it doesn’t smell like Patrick.

Packing up the van and hitting the road for Warped makes it so Pete can breathe again.

They are wandering the concert grounds, Pete and Patrick, hoping to catch some sets while they kill time til soundcheck on their stage. A lot of Pete’s life feels difficult, but being with Patrick is the simplest thing. It untangles Pete. It uncomplicates him.

The way Patrick is shining today, hair tousled from a night spent driving, beaming from under the brim of his trucker hat, unshowered and smelling just slightly of sweat, Pete believes all over again that this kid is magic. Shows make the kids out there feel what Pete always feels when he looks at Patrick; that’s why they learn the words, that’s why they rush the stage. That’s why they show up at all. Patrick gives them all pieces of something bigger than themselves, like Patrick holds the whole sun inside him. Patrick has the mercurial temper of the fae, too. Patrick has literally choked Pete before over an alliteration disagreement. (The reaction of Pete’s body to this event is better left undiscussed.) His temper flashes on and off with the all-or-nothing totality and ease of a firefly’s ass.

Casually, Pete asks, “Patrick, is there anything… strange about you that you would like me to know?”

Patrick trips over his own feet in alarm. “What?” he squawks.

“You know, anything… unusual, or… hard to believe? Like, you know, a secret you’ve never been able to tell anyone? A secret that would explain, sort of, the peculiar… slightly enchanted _glow_ that comes off of you?” Pete should have stuck to tossing metal at him or trying to catch him in a lie, honestly. There is no oblique, mellow, conversational way to ask someone whether they’re a mythological entity of magic and beauty. There’s just not.

Patrick is like three different kinds of purple, just on his face. “What did you find?” he asks in that same strangled voice. His hands are spasmodic fists. He looks like he might pop. “Did Andy talk to you or…?”

So Andy _is_ in on it. Pete had the feeling Andy knew too much about him. “I’ve just been watching you is all,” Pete says.

Patrick looks so stricken, Pete wants to let him know it’s okay—that Pete’s familiar with the fucked-up world of faerie, that Patrick doesn’t need to worry this will change anything. (Although of course, Pete worries too: if Patrick is Seelie, he’ll have heard of Pete, probably. Pete absolutely will not survive Patrick looking at him in fear. Such a moment is to be avoided at any cost.)

“It’s okay,” Pete adds. “I know… I understand what it’s like to try and live in both words. I, um, have some experience with… Fuck. I have a lot of experience with the other side.”

Patrick is looking decidedly panicked. “I’m—I’m NOT GAY!” he shouts suddenly. “Okay?! I am not _gay_ , Pete, and I don’t care what Andy told you, and you _agreed_ that if you used my laptop the search history was _off limits_ , that’s the only reason I didn’t change my password after last time—”

Pete’s mouth is hanging open. Even if he was able to lie, there’s no way he’d be able to cover his reaction. This is un-fucking-believable. “Patrick, I was trying to ask if you were a _faerie_ ,” Pete tries to explain.

“Yeah, and fuck you for that!” Patrick yells. People are giving them a wide berth. Pete would like to be one of them. It was a bad choice of words. “I’m just—I’m just figuring some shit _out_ , okay? I’ve had _a ton_ of girlfriends, so—”

“Like two girlfriends,” Pete interjects. _A ton_ was definitely a lie. Pete is uncomfortable with false and empty words, even when they’re someone else’s. Pete’s too stunned to really know what he’s saying.

“SHUT UP, PETE!” Patrick has stopped walking. He’s just staring at Pete furiously, his face red and twisted, his eyes filled with—oh, fuck no, not tears. Pete cannot with the tears. Broken-open Patrick is his kryptonite. Pete tries to put hands on him, to smooth him back into place, to comfort him, but Patrick shoves him away. Pete stumbles, hurt by the meaning more than the movement.

“You can tell Andy that my life is _neither of your businesses_ ,” Patrick snarls. “You of _all people_ should understand, Pete Wentz, what this is _like_. It’s difficult and confusing enough without your friends being—being a bunch of _binary fascists_.”

“Patrick,” Pete tries helplessly.

“No!” Patrick snaps. “If I want to fucking talk to you about it, Mr. Lots of Experience with the Other Side, I will fucking _let you know_.”

Patrick turns and storms off in the opposite direction. Pete follows, a few respectful feet behind. “Stop _following_ me!” Patrick yells over his shoulder. Pete pauses, lets Patrick get a few more feet ahead, and then starts following again.

Pete’s head is swimming, spinning. Boundaries, borders—they are different for faeries. Pete, raised by humans, understands this. He’s pretty sure Patrick isn’t fae, after that disastrous conversation. But he thinks he’s learned something even more important. Something better.

*

The sun comes out for their set in Detroit. The lawn is mobbed, bodies as far as the eye can see. “Look at all these kids,” Joe says wonderingly.

“ _Our_ kids,” Patrick chips in. Patrick is still mad at Pete and, transitively, Andy, although Pete still doesn’t know what kind of sexual-orientation-badgering Andy was implicated in, but he suffers Pete to sling his arm over his shoulders and squeeze him. They look out over the crowd.

“Let’s make this one magic, boys,” Pete says with a grin. He steps up to his mic. He hollers, “HELLO DETROIT!” and the sound that comes back almost bowls him over backwards. He can instantly feel it surging through him, their rawness, their _energy_. These kids are here for them. They didn’t wander over to this stage accidentally. There are so many of them. Pete can feel the love pouring off them. It lifts him up. Unseelie magic, it’s not good for much but destruction; but with Patrick this close, and these kids here with their hearts out, even Pete’s clumsy touch can swirl their faith into something beautiful. He charms a kind of amplifier around the four of them, around the stage; an amplifier of emotion, of the energy of the band and the fans, so they can feed back and forth into each other. Pete feels made of gold, up on this stage with these kids endless before them. He wants to make sure they feel golden too.

They kick off the set. Even without the spell, this crowd is _insane_. They’ve never played a show like this. Somehow these kids know all the words. They’re shouting them back at him. Joe jumps, spins, getting just slightly more air than should be possible. Andy’s pulling off truly impressive tricks with his drumsticks, the rhythm of their work absolutely shredding the air around him as he gives it literal life. Patrick’s emboldened enough to dance. Pete smashes his body against Patrick’s, taking everything he means and flinging it into his bass, into the music they’re creating.

At the end of their third song, there’s no keeping the fans back anymore. They rush the stage. There are so many of them. Pete’s dancing with strangers, laying his hands on sweaty heads like blessings, playing and singing his sincerest, best heart out when the stage collapses under them. The lights die, the equipment gives out. It doesn’t matter. All of them together, all these tangled-up kids and believers, they sing _Where Is Your Boy_ without instruments, without speakers, without microphones. Every single person there knows it by heart.

*

Pete doesn’t really have the supplies to scry properly, so he creates a tiny basin out of his cupped hands, fills them with water, and uses his teeth to drop the raven feather in. The image of a beady raven eye clarifies in the water. “Tell Eloissine I did it,” Pete says. He is grinning so hard his face might split. He has never felt less Unseelie than he does today. “I moved a fucking mountain. We moved the whole fucking crowd, we moved their hearts, we moved their bodies. The fucking stage _collapsed under our feet_. That’s tectonic movement. That’s the earth shifting beneath her fucking throne!”

Then he goes and finds Patrick, finds the band. So energized they can’t sit still, they catch some headliners, see some performances, go out and celebrate. No one’s feet quite touch the ground. None of them can believe it. “This is really happening,” Patrick shouts into Pete’s ear while they watch Rise Against. Pete’s so filled with joy, with reckless abandon—the tasks are _not_ impossible, he is _puling this off_ , at this rate he’ll be a free man in no time, and what a fucking band he’ll get to belong to!—that when every cell in his body screams to kiss Patrick on the ludicrous pink mouth, he doesn’t shut it down. He catches Patrick by the chin and kisses him, right there in the throbbing concert crowd.

If he’s not totally mistaken, in the few seconds before Patrick shoves him away, _he kisses back_. Patrick takes his hand and scowls up at him. “You’re an asshole,” he says fondly.

*

Pete wakes in the middle of the night. He’s sharing a double bed with Patrick in the deeply dubious hotel room the band splurged on, after the mind-blowing awesomeness of their stage-crushing set. He fell asleep with his head on Patrick’s chest, just to see if he could get away with it. Well, 2:37am and Patrick’s asleep underneath him, an arm flung over Pete’s back—he’s definitely getting away with it.

Pete snuggles down to go back to sleep, but the same inexplicable urgency that woke him tugs at his awareness again.

He gets out of bed and follows his feet into the tiny bathroom. Joe and Andy are both snoring, sleeping a normal bed-sharing distance apart in their double. Pete stands blearily in front of the bathroom mirror, illuminated only by whatever moonlight is filtering through the hotel room, not sure why he’s standing there.

Then the bathroom in the mirror, but not the bathroom he is standing in, lights up an eerie, candlelight blue. Okay. That is… troubling. Pete kicks the bathroom door shut, stubbing his toe. “Can whatever freaky magic shit is going to happen just get on with it,” he mumbles, scrubbing at his eyes. Oak and ash, he wants to be sleeping. He wants to be curled up with Patrick and—and doing any activity that complements being curled up with Patrick, really.

“Is that any way to address your Queen?” Eloissine’s frosty voice precedes her. Her face swims in the mirror frame like a surrealist painting, not quite clarifying into an image of her. “I received your crude message.”

“I used your own messenger, Your Majesty, I don’t know what else you wanted—a trumpet fanfare?” It is kind of amazing, how much Pete used to care about this scary creature’s approval. Patrick, warm and waiting in a bed too small to share: that was all it took. A golden voice coming out of ridiculous lips on an amazing boy. It was like the part of Pete’s life where he was enchanted was every minute he spent _without_ Patrick, like meeting Patrick was him opening his eyes for the first time. There was never anywhere he belonged, so he would have signed on with anyone who could provide an explanation, who’d give him colors to wear and a team to join. Even if it was Team Torture and Murder. Patrick… Patrick gives him somewhere he hopes to one day be worthy of belonging. Pete’s never wanted to be worthy of anything before. Pete’s never wanted to be _good_ before.

He wants to be good now. Good enough for this.

“I hold your first task as complete,” Eloissine says crisply. Maybe Pete could have been nicer; he sort of just assumed she was here to harass him. “Your work today was impressive. I hope you are enjoying the appropriate revels.”

Pete’s thoughts flash on Patrick, kissing him back. Pete’s thoughts won’t go anywhere but Patrick tonight.

“Return to my Court by the first day of the new moon,” says the Queen. Pete is her sworn knight; her word is command. He couldn’t disobey if he wanted to. _This is why you’re dangerous_ , Pete reminds himself, because for a minute there, he was in danger of forgetting. For one fucking minute in his life he was in danger of feeling _light_. “And receive your next task.”

Pete goes back to Patrick, back to sleep. He is so, so happy. The next two tasks feel ephemeral, thinner than air—cotton candy. He nuzzles his face into sleeping Patrick’s warm neck. He feels like he can do anything.

*

“For your second task,” says Queen Eloissine, her mouth full of teeth like broken glass and someone else’s scarlet blood, “work a miracle.”


	6. I've Already Given Up On Myself Twice, Third Time Is The Charm

In impossible rage and desperation, Pete self-destructs. He emits a concussive blast of involuntary magic; glass and wood and lesser fae burst into shrapnel around him, exploding like fireworks into splinters and self-harm. What is not smashed by the blast he hacks at with his sword, not caring whether it’s living or inanimate, furniture or fae; he bashes with the handle, sweeps and thrusts with the big blade, whirls in rings of violent abandon that delight Eloissine, her laughter rolling out and landing sticky on his skin. Or maybe it’s the blood that’s sticky. He goes for Eloissine: he will work the miracle of cleaving her head from her shoulders, he will free himself that way, but of course there are sworn knights who come between the two of them. There is no madness sufficient to cloud out the compulsive loyalty of Pete’s oath; he will never be able to hurt her no matter how he wishes to; but they cannot stand idly and watch him try any more than he can actually succeed. Magic binds. Oaths compel. They move like marionettes.

Nassara uses her blade to block, again again and again. Distantly, some part of Pete is aware she is trying not to hurt him. Distantly, Pete is aware that he is throwing the most damaging of all possible tantrums. Closely, though, Pete is mostly just aware of the feeling of the _trap_ closing in around him, the hideous unfairness. Never in his life has he belonged. Never in his life has he fit. Why does she keep him? Why can she not let him go? Is there not plenty of other suffering she can use to entertain herself?

The other knights, they’re less picky about hurting Pete. Unseelie, after all. And it’s not like Pete is taking care about who he hurts either. His skin is so sticky. There is so much blood. Iron edges open his skin and heat pours out. Everything is slick and scarlet. He is spinning, or else the world is spinning. Everything hurts so much he doesn’t know what’s a wound and what’s just being alive. He will hack this hill apart from the inside, if they won’t let him move it like a mountain from without. He will destroy everything, starting with himself. There is no point to anything but this: the swing of the sword. The gush of his blood. The screams and the laughter staining the air black as ink, black as magic, black as blood.

He doesn’t want to stop. He wants to fight, to hurt, to bleed, to die. Pete is an Unseelie changeling. He’s never had a choice. Why not die, then, with this sword in his hand? Maybe if he’s lucky, he can stick the other end in someone else’s neck.

As if it the most tedious thing in the world, Eloissine’s voice snaps out, clear in the chaos, rising musically above the screams. She’s had a lot of practice at projecting her voice louder than screams. “Stop,” she drawls. Everything with a heartbeat, and several fae who are swiftly losing their claim to that much, freezes as utterly as if she’d captured them in amber. They are bound, as ever, by her command. The only sound in the chamber is the _patpatpat_ of someone’s dripping blood. She could ask them not to breathe, and they’d stop breathing.

Her voice is a winter chill. “I’m losing interest in your temper tantrums, changeling. You are as poor a soldier as ever I feared. It occurs to me it would certainly be… _cleaner_ to dispense with you now. Sir Nassara?”

At a quirk of Eloissine’s brow, Nassara raises her sword. It prickles through the ionized air that lives above Pete’s neck. Pete’s life throbs in him, but not for long.

“Tell me, _Peter Wentz_ , why should I suffer you to live a moment more?”

If Pete had an answer to that question, well, at least he’d have one damn thing in the world that he wanted. He does not. Instead, he says, “You’ve never minded a mess before, Your Majesty.”

Eloissine chuckles. The blade above Pete’s frozen neck vibrates in Nassara’s outstretched grip. The knight is strong, sinewy and thick-armed with muscle, but no one can hold a heavy blade outstretched forever. Gravity does not belong to the Seelie or the Unseelie fae. Gravity belongs to itself.

“You do always make me laugh,” Eloissine muses. It is agony, feeling that blade tremble, feeling his life twist in the wind, while she _grins_ and _considers_ and _decides._

When has Pete ever gotten to fucking decide?

“Kill me.” The words rip out of him, unplanned and unwise, as usual. “I can’t complete your tasks. You’ll never let me. So what difference is it, live or die, if I can’t either way get what I want?”

“Childish, though. Sun and stars, you are young. I closed my eyes to blink and you sprung up before me; your whole life has passed before my blink is finished. You are nothing, changeling. You don’t even own your own name. So do not consider it wise to tempt me.”

“Do I strike you as someone acting out of wisdom?” Pete’s voice is taking a frantic edge. Nassara’s sword scrapes the fine hairs on the back of his neck. He meant it, means it. She will never let him have Patrick. If he is ever so foolish as to tell her Patrick’s name, she will make Pete kill him. She’ll find it funny. Pete knows everything, can bear nothing. “Kill me, if I am of no further use!”

“Nassara—stand down.” A galaxy of possibilities stretched inside that pause. Pete gasps sloppily for breath. He can feel the pain, now, seeping into him in the place of all the blood he’s losing. His skin has been pierced and slit and split and spoiled. Iron, every wound iron. What’s a few more scars?

_Stand down_. Tonight, then, he’ll live. Pete cannot quite feel relief.

“After all,” Eloissine says, “you _are_ very entertaining. Who else can play such funny songs?”

*

Pete doesn’t really expect anyone to be anything but cruel to him. He is capable of terrible things. To many fae creatures, Pete is the last thing they see before they die. He is a black and bloody knight, and every time he chews his own leg off to be free of this gory trap, it just grows back. He is not well-loved.

As far as he’s concerned, that makes Patrick a miracle.

Sometimes, when it’s just the two of them in the studio, settling in to the first few hours of a day that will probably stretch on for fourteen, Pete sits at the computer working on lyrics or posting on about his dreams on their messageboard, and Patrick drifts up behind him and just stands there, so close Pete’s back prickles with the heat of Patrick’s body.

“At least let me get the words down before you start criticizing their syllable structure or whatever,” Pete says softly, without heat. Their arguments about _Grave_ were so bitter, drawn-out, and ridiculously petty that Andy and Joe won’t even show up until sometime past noon. The idea is to let them get the worst and most physically hazardous of the squabbling out of their systems so actual recording can happen. Pete likes to imagine those unsupervised hours unrolling before him like a carpet, like a long white ribbon of paper he can write whatever he wants on. Like a clean sheet Patrick might lie on with him.

Patrick just floats there, one of his hands hovering an inch above Pete’s arm. Actually Patrick’s presence has the intoxicating effect of making words flood out of him, but Pete doesn’t admit this. He pretends to be grumpy about it. It’s important not to look at things like this straight on. If you acknowledge them, they evaporate from the heat and light of your gaze. “Filthy screener,” Pete mutters. Patrick floats on.

Other times, when it’s just the two of them, Patrick sits on the couch and scribbles in his notebook, frowning and humming and using his pen and his finger as the tiniest drumsticks while he wrestles with a melody. Sometimes he gets up and grabs a guitar. Pete likes to trap him before he can do this: to flop backwards across the couch, taking Patrick’s thighs as his pillow, and lay there humming along with Patrick and trying to swirl up words that are true that will fit to that music. Patrick is always very frustrated with Pete’s insistence on words being true. Pete is eternally frustrated with the smell Patrick gives off, the welcoming cushion of his thighs, the way his long golden-red hair falls around his face. He lies across Patrick’s captive thighs and watches him through slits, pretending his eyes are closed, just breathing him in. Just so lucky to be here. To be with him.

Sometimes, Patrick lets his hand fall to Pete’s chest. Lets Pete close his hands on top of it, holding it against his heart. Sometimes they stay that way for hours.

Isn’t that a miracle?

*

Pete writes what Patrick means to him into every song. He’ll make Patrick sing what he can never say to him. He can’t tell whether Patrick has noticed. He can’t tell if he wants him to.

They are living in California, put up in corporate digs by the label. If recording _Grave_ was a brutal sprint, _Cork Tree_ is meant to be a luxurious poolside stroll. Actually, Pete doesn’t like this as well. He doesn’t like all the extra time to _think_. When it was urgent, when Patrick was pressed up against him screaming, when their skins were raw and their words were fists and they were just trying to clobber each other into submission so they’d have a song—that felt truer, to Pete. His words were birthed better by strife. Anyway yelling is a _safe_ way to express some of his drowning, impossible intensity about Patrick. Patrick makes him the most selfish person in the world. Patrick makes him demented. He wants to sew their skins together, turn them into a storybook monster, a living nightmare—whatever it takes so they never have to be parted.

Pete is far, far from home. In California, he can’t feel the tiny hooked claws of magic scratching at his skin as it crawls up his bare chest, hangs off his bare arms. He can’t feel the susurrus of Eloissine’s every whisper tickling over his wrists, giving him an itch deeper than skin, an itch he’d need metal to scratch. He can’t be compelled to do anything, from this distance.

That means that whenever he does something wicked, he has only himself to blame. He is very cautious of mirrors at night now, but so far the only monster he’s seen is him.

Every day he picks a leaf off a bush or a flower or a tree, some LA plant so voluptuous and lush with life that it borders the vulgar, and drops it into a sink full of water. “Is it a miracle yet?” he asks. “Is it a miracle?”

There’s never any answer.

*

Pete decides he wants Patrick to see magic. After all, Patrick has filled his life with so much wonder. There’s a whole dark, incredible, terrifying, amazing world happening right beside Patrick’s eyes and Patrick doesn’t even know. Pete wants to tell him, _look again, when you’re in the doorway. Pay special attention when you’re crossing thresholds. It’s there, right at the edge of your vision. It’s leering at you from your blind spot. Look sideways, look inside-out, and you’ll see_.

If Pete says that, though, Patrick might see more than magic. He might see Pete.

Words are tricky, sometimes binding. Pete decides to show him instead.

He takes Patrick above the smogline. They go to the Getty Center, look out over the city and beyond it, the sea. Short of finding another Court’s hill and gatecrashing the revels there, it is the most magical place Pete knows. Above the smog, above the enchantment, they see L.A. stripped to its buzzard bones. Bursts of magic swirl like auroras, flicker like fireflies, spoiling the sunset like flashbulbs. All Patrick sees is the skyline. All Patrick sees is what he expects to see.

“Have you ever seen something you can’t explain?” Pete asks carefully.

“Like aliens?” says Patrick. “Or, like, you trying to get your eyeliner even for 45 minutes?”

“ _No_ ,” Pete says. “Yes. Sort of like aliens. Sort of like… magic.”

Patrick gives Pete the side-eye. Patrick Stump is truly gifted at incredulous looks. “Like magic how?”

Pete sighs, frustrated. “I feel like you aren’t answering the question.”

“I feel like you aren’t _asking_ the question,” Patrick counters. “Like, have I seen some Harry Potter-Narnia-World of Warcraft spellcasting before my very eyes? No, I have not. Have I seen four kids in a van skyrocket to success they couldn’t have dreamed? Yeah, that I’ve seen. Have I seen things that… unnerved me, that weren’t there when I looked again, that I had to decide I imagined in order to stay sane? Have I seen things… like _that_ … around you? Is that what you’re asking?”

Instead of answering this complicated, implicating question, Pete clasps Patrick’s hands, leans forward, and tenderly spits in his eye.

Just one eye. That’ll be important, later.

“WHAT THE FUCK,” screeches Patrick, ripping away from Pete, trying to scrub the offending fluid out of his eyeball. “WHAT WAS THAT FOR? YOU DISGUSTING ASSHOLE!”

“I’m sorry,” Pete says without feeling. He’s only sorry that the spit is necessary, not that he spat it. He sidesteps a disavowal, dodges a lie. “I got overexcited. Patrick, look at the city. Tell me what you see.”

Patrick punches Pete, hard, in the lung. Pete’s ribs shift painfully to accommodate Patrick’s fist. Patrick’s face is red, wrinkled and furious as a newborn. “What the _fuck_ ,” he demands again. “You _spit on me, Pete_.”

“I feel certain I’ve done worse,” Pete points out, gasping. Patrick punches him again for his trouble. But what is Pete supposed to say? _Faerie spit can give you Second Sight, at least for a little while?_

Patrick glares at Pete hard, and Pete hopes his glamour is good. He tugs the edges of it tighter around himself. He stills wears the glamour the Unseelie gave him, when they placed him in a human family's home. He knows it’s a good glamour, thicker and more skillful than his meager magic could produce. Still, even with a small amount of spit in only one eye, he worries Patrick might see through it.

He worries Patrick has always seen through it.

Worries. And hopes.

“I am never going anywhere with you again,” Patrick complains crabbily. He crosses his arms and turns away from Pete, which faces him out over the skyline, the smog, the sea. His breath catches in his throat and Pete knows he sees it. Colors and light to rival the sunset; royal purple, blue ochre, cerulean and woad. Scarlet, ostentatious umber, explosive magenta and preposterous carmine. A sunset made of shooting stars. The whole skyscape is filled up with hexes, charms, glamours, auras, enchantments. This is Los Angeles. Nothing is what it seems. Magic is everywhere. Pete can feel it, pushing against his skin, looking for a way in.

He takes Patrick’s hand. He wills Patrick to feel it too.

“I’ve never seen a sunset like this,” Patrick says at last. His voice sounds ragged. His eyes are wide, his pupils tiny eclipses.

“This isn’t a sunset,” Pete says, “it’s magic.”

Patrick leans against Pete’s shoulder. They stay on Getty, buffeted by the wind and the impossible beauty, until the sun is down and the city lights are up. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” says Patrick again.

“It’s always like that,” Pete tells him. “You just have to know how to look.”

*

It still doesn’t count as a miracle.

Pete hates the album. They toss eight songs and record eight new ones in a goddamn frenzy, with a wild frenetic panic that feels just like _Grave_. Turns out they do well there, under the fucking boot. In California Pete starts to feel stretched thin, unreal. He forgets the scent of leaves, the feel of winter. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily.

He forgets the smell of Court. He forgets, sometimes, that under his human skin there is a second one. He forgets, sometimes, what he is.

What he really is.

He doesn’t forget the _taste_ of leaves, nor the feel of them coming up his throat. He starts vomiting bloody mats of mud, twigs, grass. He does not tell anyone about this. He doesn’t know what to say, or why anyone would care if he did. Doesn’t everyone get homesick, when they’ve been away?

Sometimes when Pete’s been away too long, it starts to feel like none of it’s real. Like he made it all up. A fairy tale he told himself, the moral of which is: it’s not your fault you don’t belong. You don’t have to be responsible, accountable. You don’t really have choices.

If you cut your human skin and blood comes out, silvery-red, almost but not quite human, does that mean you’ve imagined who you are and where you’re from? What does it mean? Is it a miracle?

Every word he writes turns to shit. There is a tsunami in India and he can’t stop thinking about it. It feels like a message, or a sign—how simple disaster. How _easy_. How _near_. He could be a tsunami. One word in his ear from the wrong faerie, and he’d tear out the heart of everyone he loves. He’d weep, but he’d have to. One word from the wrong faerie and he’d have no _choice_.

Pete stops talking to the rest of the band. Even Patrick. He ventures out of his dark room to slip them lyrics, sometimes, but he only hates himself more for every word he does and does not write.

Pete goes home, but that doesn’t make it better. He thinks he’ll be safe in a city choked with iron but he’s not, he’s not safe anywhere.

Finally, when he cannot take it anymore, when he just needs it to _all stop_ for _one fucking minute_ so he can _take a breath_ , he drives to a quiet parking lot (wouldn’t want your family to be the ones to find you), takes a handful of pills, and doesn’t care what happens to him.

He calls Patrick and it goes to voicemail. Pete can’t say anything anyway. He doesn’t have words for what he wants or what he’s done. He just cries into the phone.

Then things go black for a while.

*

Pete lives, but no one calls it a miracle.

*

Pete dreams or sleeps or dreams. The IVs they try to put in him blister and burn in his skin. He floats in and out on a sea of medication, lapping the shore. Eloissine swims in and out of focus. Patrick stands by his bedside, saying nothing. Maybe Pete’s just dreaming. Maybe Patrick holds his hand.

_You think I would let you die? You are mine, and Pete Wentz is just the skin you are wrapped in. Don’t forget it._

Is it Patrick’s voice, or is it the Queen’s? Pete loses track of himself. Loses track of who owns him.

*

He isn’t strong enough to leave Eloissine’s territory. Fuck, he isn’t strong enough to leave his childhood bedroom. The one painted and appointed for someone else. His brain and heart and body, they need time. He may be a changeling, but he’s not _changing_.

The band goes to Europe without him.

Sometimes he thinks it’s better that way.

*

Who the fuck even believes in miracles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um I'm sorry if I ever said anything to you that led you to think this story would be lighthearted, carefree, and fun, because while it is capable of being those things, a lot of the time instead it chooses to be suffering. I love it _so much_. 
> 
> Next: recovery or close enough; kisses given and poorly stolen; a warning. Thanks for reading and for talking to me! You guys are too good.


	7. Don't Breathe Life Into A Monster Then Complain When He Destroys It All

Pete goes to therapy. He sits across the desk from a well-meaning woman who always looks slightly puzzled by what he says. She adjusts her glasses, takes small sips of water, and frowns at the notepad on which she never writes. Pete wonders what he’d have to say, to get her to pick up her pen. He bets _I’m a faerie_ would do it. He can’t tell whether she knows he’s slightly famous and has an excellent poker face or has no idea he’s anybody, because he’s nobody, really.

He sits in her office and thinks these thoughts to himself. For a guy who makes his living by writing words, these days he doesn’t have a lot to say. He can tell she’s confused why he shows up every day, and he can tell because she asks him.

“Pete, you’ve been in my office for fifty minutes every day for the last two weeks,” she says mildly one day. “In the most compassionate way possible, I’m not sure why you keep showing up.”

“I took too many pills in a parking lot,” Pete says. “They pumped my stomach and watched me for a week. They let me out. I started coming here.” He sticks to the truth. He does not embellish.

There’s her frown again—a quick, downwards tug of the lips, and then back to neutral. “Yes, that part you’ve told me. That part is _all_ you’ve told me, Pete.”

“I told you about that dream I had,” Pete protests.

“I find other people’s dreams rather boring. Don’t you?”

Silence stretches between them. Finally Pete says, “I can’t lie to you, and you won’t believe the truth. I don’t know what that leaves me with.”

The psychologist drops her pen on the pad and stretches her arms out, cracking her knuckles. This is a new gesture, one Pete has not seen before. He wonders if he earned it by using a new dialogue option, if she is an NPC with a more extensive repertoire than he credited her with. “Well, it sounds like we’re stuck, then. You can’t talk and I don’t think there’s any therapeutic value in me just staring at you. Turns out therapy is actually _made of_ talking. So what do you suggest we do?”

Pete is surprised to realize that he likes her. He hasn’t had an opinion about anything in a while. “I don’t know whether I wanted to die,” he says. “It is hard… to imagine… not existing. But it’s hard to imagine existing too. I was feeling… trapped. Like the record would be this huge flop, and like… the things that I have to accomplish, if I’m ever going to be happy, if I’m ever going to be with the person I love… like those things are completely impossible. So I came home, I thought I could take a break and be safe, but then… something bad happened. I did something bad. And I felt… it was like, with alternating breaths, I was so depressed I couldn’t lift my head or bear to live, or I was so anxious I would’ve liked to split my way out of my skin. I wanted a way to stop the clock. I wanted… a way to _stop_.”

She still hasn’t picked up her pen, but she’s watching him with interest. It’s more words than he’s ever said to her in a row. Even when she did his intake interview, it was like pulling teeth: quiet, bloody, awful for everyone involved.

“Thank you, Pete,” she says mildly. She says everything mildly, except for a few times he’s made her laugh. “I appreciate the effort you put in, just now. I know it’s not easy to talk about. I’d like you to tell me more.”

*

Pete gets better, or else he doesn’t. With Patrick over an ocean and him in the house of people who are not really his parents with no particular hope of ever working a miracle (hence why it’s called a miracle), nothing has much of a point.

When Patrick calls from Ireland, Pete feels tears sting at his eyes, he’s so grateful. Crying is a distinctly human behavior. Faeries do not produce water from their eyes; nor do they grieve, Pete thinks, or feel sadness. It is hard to comprehend loss without first comprehending time, mortality, and the brutally linear fucking nature of each.

They’re strange, these little reminders he’s human deeper than his false skin. That he lived the first seven years he can really remember never knowing he was anything else, that he’s lived his whole life among them, loving them, hurting them, being loved and hurt by them—that he learned from this. That it changed him.

Sometimes, Pete feels like he’s not just a bloody Unseelie plaything who thought he’d found a home under a hill, once; who did terrible things for the amusement of the only family he thought he’d ever find; who found a place he fit, four kids in a van driving through the night, couldn’t fit there either, and made a sloppy attempt to die. Sometimes, Pete feels like he’s human too.

A foot in each world. Not part of either.

Patrick calls from overseas, and just his distance-crackled voice over the line lays Pete low. The miles between them cannot disguise the anger that lives in Patrick’s voice.

“It’s so fucking green here,” Patrick says by way of greeting, “and I’ve been seeing things I can’t explain. It’s foggy and wet and it’s beautiful, and it sucks that you’re not here. You said you’d be the frontman. We had a deal. Without you around, they all look at me, like _I’m_ supposed to have emo positivity speeches and sexy dance moves.”

Pete sucks in his breath and laughs, at the same time wetness leaks from his eyes. Faeries have much simpler emotions than this. This is complicated. Patrick… complicates him. Patrick makes him simpler too. Pete is a tangle, a knot. A not. “You think my dance moves are sexy?”

“Shut up, I’m not being nice to you,” Patrick says grumpily. Pete wants to roll around in the sound. He wants to build his heart on it. Patrick _misses_ him. Patrick’s mad because he wishes Pete was there. This thought is so delightful, it almost makes Pete think fondly of the ocean between them. Almost.

“You have to be nice to me, Patrick,” Pete informs him. “I almost died.”

“And whose fault it that?!” Patrick’s exasperation is not playful. Pete knows it is too soon to joke, but everyone has been so serious since it happened—himself included. He promised everyone he wouldn’t try it again, whatever he was even trying. If they were faeries, his word would be enough. It’s not like he can tell a lie. It’s not like he ever could.

“I didn’t say it wasn’t my fault. There’s this rule, though, about overdoses and subsequent niceness. I’ve been _observing_.”

“You’ve been under observation too,” says Patrick. “Your mom’s been emailing us progress reports. Says you’ve been mooning around and moping, coming home late at night with muddy shoes, leaving dead leaves in her foyer and not being good for much else.”

“Again, _niceness_. I cannot stress this enough.” The way Patrick started the call is poking at Pete’s brain. His thoughts keep snagging on it. “Patrick? What things?”

“Things?”

“What things have you been seeing that you can’t explain?”

“Oh. You know. Men with buns, fans wearing homemade shirts with your face on them, policemen in kilts, actual horse-drawn buggies on the main roads that refuse to pull over for our bus. Joe eating haggis. Andy flirting. All kinds of impossible shit on this side of the pond.”

Pete sighs with such force his bangs fly off his forehead. “I can never tell if you’re lying,” he complains. “It’s very obnoxious, the way you always lie.”

Pete means _you_ like _you human beings_. Patrick hears it like _you, Patrick Martin Stump._ For obvious reasons, Pete does not correct him. “I do not _always_ lie!”

“Now you’re lying about lying,” Pete tuts. “It’s very sad. You have a condition.”

“I keep thinking I see… like, out of the corner of my eye…”

Pete drops the teasing instantly. He is alert like a shark that’s caught the first whiff of a diver who was ripped in fucking half nine miles up the current. The next scent he catches will determine in which direction he sprints. “Yes?”

“It’s stupid,” Patrick says. “Never mind. Jet lag, you know. And the usual shit sleep schedule and diet. I’m not gonna listen to you say I’m hallucinating, _you’re_ the one having the mental health outburst and I am very aware of how you like to shift blame.”

“Patrick, if you’re seeing something… _supernatural_ … I just want you to know I believe you.” There’s a long beat. Pete wants to tell the truth, the whole truth. It’s always burning behind his lips, making his teeth buzz like they’re radio transmitters. But if Patrick’s in danger now, what will happen to him if Pete tells him all the secrets? Anyway. ‘Mental health outburst.’ Who’s to say Patrick would even believe him?

“Thanks, Pete.” A pause. A subject change. “Tell me again,” Patrick says.

“Tell you what?”

“You know. That you didn’t mean to.”

Pete smiles into the phone. It’s a sad smile and a soft one. He will be saying it over and over and over for a very long time. He knows this. No matter how long he repeats the words, Patrick might never be able to believe them. He’s hard to believe. No one ever assumes he’s saying anything more than what they want to hear, not since he acted more loudly than words can undo.

For Patrick, he will never stop saying them. If that’s what it takes.

Pete takes a deep breath. For once, he tells a whole truth.

“I didn’t plan to, I didn’t mean to. I love you. You’re my best friend and I never meant to try to leave you.”

*

The faerie knight finds him like this:

Slumped, somewhere between sitting upright and sprawling dead on his back, draped over his parents’ sad brown couch in an empty house, staring slackly at a television that may or may not even be on.

“Your Queen commands you,” Nassara says by way of greeting. It is clear she is disgusted by him—his sweatpants, his dirty hair, his general demeanor of squalor. They haven’t seen each other in weeks. Not since _before_. Not since Pete’s own hopelessness and horror drove him desperate. Drove him almost-dead.

“Since when are you a messenger pigeon?” Pete says it just to piss her off. Just to feel like he’s got power over _something_. “She’s got ravens for that.”

“Since the last time she sent you on an errand and you couldn’t be bothered to return.” Nassara’s inhuman eyes are flinty. She’s trying to sound like she doesn’t care, but Pete thinks she’s mad at him. “You now warrant an escort.”

“You mean when she sent me to execute that brownie,” Pete recites dully, “and I tried to refuse, and she used my oath to compel me, she _forced_ me, and because I fought the sword went sideways and lodged in the fucking thing’s spine, and it bled out all over me and filled its lungs with its own blood screaming, and none of us knows if it died from the fucking gouge in its neck or from drowning? _That_ errand?”

“And then you tried to poison yourself clean, as if pouring poison on top of poison ever made a cure. Yes, Pete. That errand.”

“Three showers and I was still finding blood on me.” Pete has been trying not to think of it, not to think of the bloody dawn on the day he may or may not have tried to end his life. Now that he’s started, the words won’t stop. “Behind my ear, in my hair, on the inside of my knee. I smelled it everywhere—so attuned to iron. Every evil thing I’ve ever done crawling on my skin, and I could _almost_ feel remorse except only humans and faeries have hearts and I’m not really either, and the impossibility of it all squeezed the cage of my ribs until I couldn’t breathe and I knew I’d never be free, never be clean, never be worthy of—”

Nassara crosses the room in one massive stride and slaps Pete across the jaw. The blow shocks him silent. Her gauntlet scrapes his cheek raw. “ _Names have power._ She is capable of worse things than you can imagine. She’d rather see you kill yourself than leave her for another, do you understand?”

“Why go to the trouble?” Pete asks bitterly, rubbing his face. “Her task is impossible. I can’t work a miracle.”

“Listen to yourself, whelp. If the task was impossible, she _wouldn’t_ go to the trouble.” Nassara widens her amber eyes imploringly. There is probably a whole spiderweb of oaths in place around her tongue, forcing her to speak in hints and riddles.

What she’s telling him is that it’s possible.

And the Queen will do anything she can to drive him mad before he does it.

Pete makes eye contact with Nassara for the first time. “What is it tonight, then?”

Nassara’s expression is smooth and untroubled as the surface of a looking-glass. “Torture. Seelie children. Her command was rather specific, so I’ll need to use your sword.”

Pete’s brain stumbles on that one. “You’re… doing it for me?” he says at last.

Nassara looks away and shrugs. She’d cringe if she realized how human the gesture was. She is nearly seven feet tall, dressed in bloody armor of petrified wood, with white hair and black skin and eyes with eerie glow: otherworldly. And still, sometimes she looks human. Sometimes she seems more human than Pete.

“Just once, I’d like to see someone else win,” she says gruffly. Pete wants to thank her, but fae are touchy about gratitude and implied debt. So all he does is pull his sword out of the air and hand it over. Nassara is careful not to let their hands touch on the hilt. Pete’s not sure why.

“The pills,” Nassara says suddenly, catching his eye. “The poison. It is crafted for humans. When you take too much, it is… a layer of fog, between you and magic. Between you and… her. Be careful. Be wise.” She hesitates. Then she adds, “If she wins, she’ll want him as a trophy. If you die…” Whatever oaths hold her in silence won’t let her say the rest. Nassara mouths the air like it’s an iron bit burning the back of her throat. No other words come out.

Pete takes her meaning.

*

Three months later and it’s like the whole world knows his name. It’s a fae nightmare. For Pete, it’s a surreal dream. He keeps waiting to wake up. This _has_ to be a miracle.

Everything he saw unfolding before him, the first time he heard Patrick sing—here it is, actually unfolding before them. He’s healthy and whole, reunited with his band, and their album is skyrocketing up the charts. Patrick sings _Sugar_ and _Dance, Dance_ every night, throwing his voice and body and glory into it wholesale. No one’s holding anything back. They play to ten thousand kids at a time—they fill arenas. Everyone knows the words, except Patrick, who sometimes forgets them. Forget glamour and what happens under the hill, _this_ is magic.

Touring is eternal summer. They live on the road, sleep through the day like vampires, light up the night. They tangle together in twin beds, sharing hotel rooms. They curl together like dreams, dreaming. Time flows around them, endless amber currents. They live outside of it. The rules are different, on the road. The rules are different when your home is not a place but a person.

On stage every night, Pete leans on Patrick, hangs off Patrick, clings to Patrick, can’t take his eyes off Patrick. Pete kisses Patrick’s neck during _Dark Alley_ , hooks his forehead on Patrick’s shoulder and plays like he can press all the words he cannot say into Patrick’s skin during _Saturday_. It is reckless. Anyone could be watching. It is Pete. Everyone is watching. It is completely typical. No one is watching.

The problem with being known for public displays of affection, for being the pop-punk make-out king, is that no one notices when you really mean it.

Patrick never notices that he really means it.

Then one night Patrick kisses him backstage.

It’s just before encore. They are sweaty and exhausted and elated. The kinetic energy of the show has them suspended in midair, like a rollercoaster in the dark; there are no clues as to whether they’ll keep going up or come crashing down. Pete is chugging water, preparing himself to give everything away one last time—that is the beauty of music, of love: it is nothing like faerie court, you can give your whole self away over and over and still have your whole self left to give again. Joe squeezes Pete’s sweaty shoulder, hugs Andy around the neck, heads for the bathroom. It is a tender time, usually a private one: they don’t share words, in the screaming space between their set and the encore. They share fleeting touches that say _I love you, you are my best friends, what we made is incredible and I couldn’t have done it without you,_ and they restore themselves to take the stage again. They save their voices, their torn-up throats.

Tonight, Patrick follows Pete into the shadows, presses him up against a riser, and kisses him with an urgency and intensity that takes Pete’s breath away. Patrick makes a fist of Pete’s t-shirt and leans into him, as if they can melt together if they try hard enough, and opens Pete’s mouth with his hot tongue. Patrick’s skin is warm, radiant, sweaty. His mouth tastes like metal and sunshine and singing, like the way the stage crackles with electricity and the overwhelming belief of their fans and the band’s commitment to each other when all four instruments meet, when Patrick lays his voice on top. Patrick kisses Pete like they’re the only two people in the world, even while chants of _Fall Out Boy_ wrinkle the air around them.

Patrick kisses Pete like he means it.

Pete kisses Patrick like he’s Pete, and this is Patrick, and he’s meant it since the first time he saw him and every second since. It is their fourth real kiss.

“Time to go,” Patrick whispers into Pete’s lips, pulling away. In the dark, Pete can see the shine of his eyes, his lips, his white grinning teeth. Patrick tugs Pete by the hand and leads him back onstage.

*

Pete tries to kiss Patrick again, when they get to the bus. Joe’s going out with some local friends, Andy’s in the shower and probably will stay there for the next ten hours, if his past egregiously long showers are any indication, and it’s just the two of them on the tiny couch. Patrick leans against Pete’s chest, his legs curled in the space between Pete’s sprawled legs, and Pete is brave enough to rub his hand up and down Patrick’s back. Patrick nuzzles into Pete’s chest and sighs.

“You smell terrible,” Patrick murmurs into Pete’s shirt. Pete lifts Patrick’s chin and catches Patrick’s lips with his own.

But Patrick pulls back. The look in his eyes is familiar as a knife in Pete’s gut. How many creatures have looked at Pete with those same eyes while he advanced on them with his burning, bloody sword? Pete has to look away.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Patrick says. “What we’re doing.”

“You kissed me,” Pete says, as if to jog Patrick’s memory. “It was great. We should do it again right away.”

“No, I meant, like… more generally.” Patrick is sitting up straight, no longer a comforting, sure weight against Pete’s chest. This is terrible.

“It’s very urgent,” Pete tries. Having a conversation right now would also be terrible. He’s so good at saying all the wrong things. He just wants to crawl into the soft, silent space where they can kiss, where they can be lips and hands and love, and not have to try to find explanations that are not lies and not whole truths either. They are something bigger than any of the words Pete knows. They are _more_. Their skins and skeletons are shaped from the same bits of stars and space. Their molecules sing, resonating, pulling each to the other. They were never meant to be apart. Language is hopelessly reductive. It won’t hold all of this.

“You showed me something in LA,” Patrick says. “And then, in Ireland, I kept seeing… I don’t know what I was seeing, and you weren’t _there_. I’m still mad at you. And I never know when you’re being serious or when you’re just being Pete.”

“And this is a list of reasons we aren’t kissing right now?”

Patrick smiles, a blush spreading from his pink cheeks outward. He tugs his hat down, shadowing his eyes. “This is a list of reasons it’s not a good idea for you and me to kiss each other. You’re my best friend, and this band is amazing, and… I don’t want to take any chances. I don’t want to mess anything up.”

“I’m not a chance,” Pete says. He leans forward, tries to kiss Patrick again. Patrick dodges so hard he falls off the couch.

Patrick frowns up at him from the floor. His voice is already climbing, so quick to anger and just as quick to forgive. He’s a hornet’s nest wrapped in cotton candy. His appearance, his sweet smile, are very deceiving. “I’m trying to have a serious conversation with you,” Patrick says, “about why we can’t do this.”

“ _You_ kissed _me_ ,” Pete points out.

Somehow, that is the last straw. Patrick gets up, shaking his head, and turns away. “Oh, like you haven’t kissed me ten thousand times,” he says. “Me and everyone else.”

He’s walking towards his bunk. Pete follows him. “Patrick—”

Patrick whirls around and glowers at Pete with such dark anger that it freezes Pete in his tracks. “I won’t make that mistake again,” Patrick says. His voice is so angry. Pete’s not-quite-heart cracks a little further, breaks a little more.

If Pete were braver. If Pete were human. If Pete weren’t a changeling sworn to the cruelest faerie in the tristate area. If, if, if.

If only.

_I love you_ , Pete doesn’t say. _For you, I moved a mountain. For you, I’ll work a miracle. Only be patient with me. Love me, and that will be enough._

Patrick pulls his curtain shut behind him. Pete doesn’t have the heart to follow. Pete doesn’t have a heart at all.

*

In the next city, at the next show, there are no kisses, onstage or off. When they return to the bus, there is a dead raven in Patrick’s bunk. Blood and feathers everywhere, like an explosion. Its head has been twisted off. One of its eyes has burst like an overripe blueberry. Its meaty skull, beaked and one-eyed and leaking fluids, sits on Patrick’s pillow.

Patrick cries when he sees it. Andy almost throws up. Pete cleans up the mess, and no one will look at him while he does it. Joe puts himself between Patrick and the bird corpse. The others ask aloud, who did this? How did it happen? Security says no one came in or out. Could it have been an accident? It got trapped in here, it hurt itself trying to escape?

They all know it wasn’t an accident. Only Pete knows it’s a message.

While Pete is stripping Patrick’s sheets, Patrick approaches. It is safer now, with the body cleared away. The body was both fragile and surprisingly heavy. The feathers blue-black and slick with blood. Ravens are bigger, up close. They are very intelligent birds when they are alive.

“Thank you,” Patrick says. In his fear, his voice is pitched low.

“Take my bunk,” Pete tells him. Thanks always put him a little on edge. “You’ll sing like shit if you’re up all night with the heebie-jeebies. I’ll swap you.”

Patrick nods, sits down on Pete’s bunk. Pete is feeling numb with his own fear. He can’t guess at what Patrick feels. Patrick is a closed book to him tonight. “Pete, about the other night. Um. When I said—when I said I wouldn’t ‘make the mistake’ again—I meant. You’re not. It’s just—”

Pete takes a last breath of air before he goes under. “I hope you don’t,” he says gruffly. He stares at the balled-up bloodstained sheets in his hands because he can’t look at Patrick. Beech and rhizantous, he fucking hopes Patrick can’t see him. Can’t really _see_ him. Pete’s never even seen his own face. It was a stupid thing, spitting in Patrick’s eye. It’s like Pete _wants_ him to get hurt.

“You hope I don’t what?” Pete doesn’t have to be looking at Patrick to hear the hurt in his voice. Pete steels himself. Pete feels nothing, nothing, nothing.

“Make the mistake again.” He bites the words out bitterly. He squeezes the sheets so hard raven blood beads. A fat half-coagulated drop splashes onto his shoe. “Because it would be. A mistake.”

Patrick’s fingers tug Pete’s belt loop. “Hold on a minute,” he protests. “Pete. Sit with me. Talk.”

Pete shakes his head at the sheet. No matter what, he must not look at Patrick. “You should stay away from me,” Pete says. It’s not a lie. He can’t lie, so he’s not lying. “I’m not good for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I bet you thought you wanted this, didn't you
> 
> Happy October! I may or may not be working on a Halloween present for you guys. It will be infinitely fluffier and less painful than this slow-motion train wreck. Writing this story is an amazing experience and I am so glad you are all here too!
> 
> Next: starlets and dick pics.


	8. Crossed Hearts and Hope-To-Dies

Fae hearts are famously fickle, legendarily lawless, with the cutting-edge caprice of carnivores.

Changelings are something else.

Pete starts dating a starlet. He does it as publically as he can. Ashlee is funny and beautiful and has smooth edges where his are rough. He can sink into her, hide himself within her. She absorbs it all. When they start spending nights together, she just strokes his hair while he weeps. She doesn’t ask why. The secret of what they have and how they work is never asking why.

When they yell, it is totally unlike when he and Patrick yell, because it builds nothing. It only tears apart. Music does not emerge from the wreckage—only misery. But when they laugh or touch or grin at each other, white teeth sparkling with flashbulbs, that’s totally unlike being with Patrick too, because they can have it. Neither of them runs away. Neither of them tries to convince the other it isn’t real. Neither of them worries that there is too much love or not enough. No one has to lie; no one has to be too honest.

Pete dates Ashlee on the glittering city streets and the covers of magazines. Pete behaves badly in public and she is his accomplice. The world knows his name, the world thinks he’s beautiful, the world loves and hates him in the exact same ways he loves and hates himself. He holds nothing back. Hot on the inside, cold to the touch. He slips his human skin, becomes fae again: terrible and beautiful and always, always moving; bound by rules mortals can’t quite see. For the first time in a long time, he is having _fun_. It reminds him of the early days of his knighthood: brutal and joyful and unflinching. He loves the way he feels nothing. He loves the way he can’t even pronounce the word _remorse_. Ashlee is small and soft under his hands, and she laughs with the same knife-edge as he. They are happy together.

They are happy together, and no one finds dead birds in their bed.

Everyone is safe. There is no bargain Pete won’t strike, no price Pete won’t pay, to keep everyone safe.

Everyone but Pete, anyway. These days, Pete doesn’t much care what happens to him.

He takes Ashlee by the hand and they run off into the night, into lights and noise and youth and money and no consequences, no regrets. Under the marquees of Times Square, in the magic-steeped hills of California, on the slushy streets of Chicago lit up by laughter and streetlights, it feels like love. Pete knows how glamour works. Pete knows about the laws of transactional magic. _Feels like_ and _is_ are close enough to the same that humans can never even tell the difference.

*

Still, Pete loves to dress Patrick in his clothes, hats and hoodies, necklaces and belts, whatever he can get away with, and steal Patrick’s t-shirts and jackets in return. Pete likes the way that even washed, the fibers of the fabric _remember_ the touch and smell of Patrick, and it only takes a little magic to coax them out again. Pete likes to wear Patrick like a second skin. He can never keep his hands off Patrick for long.

He tells himself it doesn’t matter, doesn’t mean anything. There are no rules if it is meaningless. If it’s a mistake.

It is Pete’s very favorite mistake.

Pete wears Patrick’s jackets to shows, to events, as often as he can get away with it. He puts hats on Patrick as casually and quickly as he puts kisses on Patrick’s neck. Affection between friends. Nothing.

Pete likes the clothes sharing because of this: it is a way of belonging to each other. Quietly, he leaves secret marks like Patrick is his personal treasure map. Affection expressed this way, fae would not understand: it is a secret language, built on human concepts of ownership and the symbolism of sharing without liege lords and feudal courts. It is an understated, voluntary, _mutual_ exchange. Fae, who are loose with their definitions of clothing and murky about the concepts of ownership and have poor memories for fleeting human details and concerns, would never even notice the pattern of exchange. Pete is counting on it.

“Pete, give me my Bowie shirt back,” Patrick complains.

“Can’t. I haven’t done laundry since Houston.” This is a truth specifically cultivated to justify the theft of Patrick’s favorite t-shirts. “Anyway, I gave you a hat for it, didn’t I?” Fae have a firm memory for bargains and trades.

Patrick eyes the garbage bag overflowing from under Pete’s bunk. “That’s your laundry?”

Pete nods. Affirmative. Patrick tugs the bag out from under the bed and marches it to the tiny bathroom. Pete follows, watching with curiosity.

Patrick upends the bag into the shower stall and turns on the water. “Guess what? You’re doing laundry.”

“There’s been a bizarre accident and all my underwear is soaking wet,” Pete calls after him as Patrick stomps out of the bathroom. “Can I borrow some of yours?”

“Fuck you,” Patrick responds.

“Patrick! What am I supposed to wear under my jeans? Are you saying you’d prefer I didn’t wear _anything_ under my jeans? Is that what you’re into? Patrick!”

A pair of boxer shorts sails down the hall and land at Pete’s feet. He hugs them to his chest, grinning at the unremarkable blue cotton and elastic like it’s the wealth of kings, like he’s struck luck beyond imagining. Well—he and Patrick found each other, didn’t they? He has.

Pete hides the boxers under his pillow and wears nothing under his jeans anyway, just in case Patrick’s into it.

*

When Pete’s penis hits the internet, when everyone starts _saying he put it up there himself because he wanted the attention_ —

He is confronted so brutally with what everyone has thought of him all along. Well. Pete’s been the black knight, the bad guy, outcast wherever he goes, evil as rot even among magic and wonders—he’s been Unseelie, in other words—all his life. Not fitting in, not belonging, fucking up: this is his exact skill set. He’s borne the bloody sword and played the hated role. It’s nothing new. When they started this band, he planned—he promised—to shoulder it all gladly, the eyes and scorn of the world, to draw it off the rest of his band. To draw it off shy Patrick.

But then it’s his fucking _dick_ on the internet, and even by Queen Eloissine herself, Pete has never felt so exploited—so used. And this is said in light of his knowing that the whole reason he exists, even, is just exactly to be used—to cover for the theft of some faerie decades ago. That’s the only reason he is who he is or lives how he does, the only reason he ever even met Patrick.

His whole existence is senseless.

Anyway, the pictures get hacked. Add it to the wall of Pete’s greatest hits, Pete’s most notable fuck-ups and failures. Pete starts to think maybe he’s not doing Patrick any favors by standing out in front and taking flak. Maybe he’s only hurting Patrick, actually, by being close enough to act as a shield.

Maybe he can’t love anything without damaging it.

Maybe everyone would be better off if he was much farther away.

Pete starts to wonder why he’s working so hard to get into the human world, why he’s trying to work _miracles_ so he can belong among them, when they’re as wicked and cruel as any faerie.

What Pete does is this:

He goes under the hill. He opens a cask of faerie wine. He gets stupidly, incredibly drunk. There’s no reason not to. He plans to stay underground forever, among his fucking Fair Folk, whether they want him or not.

The way Pete sees it, there’s nowhere else for him to go. This is the safest place for a thing like him. For everyone else.

Cell reception is shit under the hill, so he gets a cantankerous dryad who owes him a favor to work a small spell to boost satellite signals in his quarters. He calls Patrick and tries to explain he’s not coming back.

Patrick, being Patrick, over-fucking-reacts.

“Is it pills again? Where are you?” Patrick demands, instantly frantic. He sounds tinny and far away, even with the dryad’s spell.

“No, it’s nothing like that,” Pete tries to protest. But Patrick hears how drunk he sounds, how sorrowful. Patrick assumes the worst.

Pete’s earned that.

“I have hated myself every _day_ for not finding a way to get to that parking lot and—and fucking save you, or hold your hand, or look in your eyes and tell you—I’m not letting that happen again, Pete Wentz. You _will_ tell me where you are and I will be there in fifteen minutes.”

Patrick’s concern is so palpable, so close to the surface. As much as Pete regrets ever making him so scared, he also wants to hear what Patrick wishes he would have told him.

“I don’t think you can get to Wilmette in fifteen minutes,” Pete says, instead of anything useful. There is a difference between _honest_ and _true_. You can say any manner of honest things without really being—truthful. Without letting anything about yourself slip.

“Are you going to fucking time me? Stay on the phone, I’m on my way. Do I need to call an ambulance? Don’t you dare lie. Is Ashlee there? Are you alone?”

“Patrick—Patrick!” Pete has to stop him now. “I swear to you, I’m just drunk. I am not in danger. You do not need to come to Wilmette. I told you,” he adds, his voice smaller. “I won’t. I won’t ever again. I love you.”

“You’re sure?”

“The surest.”

Patrick exhales audibly. It sounds like weeks, months of tension whooshing out. Oh, Pete regrets it.

Pete hates himself for how much it means to him: the proof that Patrick cares.

“Okay. Okay. I’m—no, I’m not okay. It’s not okay. I’m not over _it_ , I might not ever be. I might just… freak out every time you call me and say something ominous for the rest of our lives. So, you know. Plan accordingly.” Patrick lets a little laughter into his voice, but it doesn’t really lighten the tone.

“I’ll do whatever I can, to help you believe me.” Pete says it so quietly, and Patrick’s so quiet, that for a while he’s not sure if Patrick has even heard him.

At last, Patrick lets out that sad chuckle again. Then he says, “Why don’t you start by explaining what this is about, if not... _that._ ”

Pete’s gut sinks. He takes another gulp of faerie wine. This does not improve matters. “Tell me you’ve already seen them,” Pete says. “Tell me I don’t actually have to be the one to _tell you about them_.”

“About what, Pete?” Patrick’s starting to sound impatient now, as he comes down off the fear and concern.

Pete cradles his head in his hand. “Google me, Patrick. And if for some reason you’re still speaking to me after that, call me back.”

Pete figures it’ll be a while before Patrick sees, processes, and calls him back. He hopes calling him back is in Patrick’s plans; he realizes too late that he didn’t actually tell Patrick that it wasn’t him who leaked them. God, he hopes Patrick knows him well enough. If Patrick doesn’t, no one possibly could.

Pete’s wrong. Patrick calls back almost immediately.

“There was probably a more direct way to show me your junk,” Patrick says dryly when Pete answers.

Pete is so relieved he would cry, if changelings did that. “You know I didn’t—”

“Of course you didn’t,” Patrick interrupts him. “And I will murder whoever did. If you want me to. I am so sorry, Pete. I can’t imagine what you’re... Well, just. Fuck.”

There is something hot and stinging pricking at Pete’s eye. Changelings do not cry, he reminds himself. It must be, ah, his eyes smarting from the wine fumes. Faerie alcohol is notoriously potent.

“But you’re not leaving the band,” Patrick says, totally ruining the moment. “You already know I’m not letting you do that.”

“I don’t actually think you get to decide,” Pete points out. “I think it’s my call. And I think it’s… it’s turning into the Pete Wentz Show. The Pete Wentz Variety Hour. You guys are these amazing musicians and the work we do, being there for kids like us, loud music for sad people—it’s _important_. And I’m taking away from it with my… with my shit.”

“Half this band is _your shit_. If you aren’t fucking up and writing songs about it, there _is_ no band.” Patrick’s voice manages to hold kindness and steel at once. It’s clear that he feels for Pete, that he’s not backing down. For right now, at least, he’s not letting Pete go. He’s not leaving Pete.

“I’ll think about it,” Pete says.

“You will not,” Patrick says. “What happened to you is _bullshit_ , and you shouldn’t be drinking alone right now. Let me pick you up.”

Pete wants to say yes. He’s drunk and just broken enough that he could bury himself in Patrick’s body without caring for the consequences. This is why he needs to say no. His life is a slow-motion car crash and Patrick is not a crash test dummy, Patrick is a person of bone and blood and flesh, and Pete can’t be quite so reckless. Pete can’t. Patrick’s a canary, Pete’s a coal mine. Patrick will choke and die blue-faced and empty of breath before pitch-black Pete ever knows anything’s gone wrong.

“I need some time,” Pete says.  He can say it because it’s not a lie: time is one of the things he needs.

What he doesn’t say is that Patrick is another.

*

Pete hides under the hill and licks his wounds.

He tells himself, you can’t hate me half as much as I hate myself. But when he thumbs open his phone browser and sees what people are saying about him online, he’s not sure if he believes it.

It’s not Patrick who digs him out. It’s not Nassara. It’s not Ashlee. Even Eloissine is being exorbitantly kind to him, not abusing his loyalty or testing his stomach. Pleased to be the place he crawls back to, she’s being _kind_. It does not suit her.

It’s Andy. Taciturn Andy who wears tattoos like armor, who was his first real human friend, who wears shyness like it’s stern stoicism—Andy who should have the _least_ patience for Pete, but whose surprising laugh and gentleness often indicates the most.

Andy doesn’t know Pete’s secret or his hiding place, but he calls Pete anyway and says, “So Patrick says you’re not quitting the band.”

“We’ve agreed to disagree on that,” says Pete. He’s been drunk for three days. He does not try to conceal this from Andy, who very graciously never thinks the worst of him.

“We care about you more than we care about anything anyone says about you,” Andy says quietly.

That does it.

*

Leaving causes a bit of a commotion.

Pete is sick and sober for the first time in days, sweating out poison. What is the point of being a magical creature if you still get hangovers? His head is pounding and he has already had two separate near-vomit experiences. The dirt halls, tangled with roots and dimly glowing crystals and shed skins, are spinning treacherously around him. He’s sure they smell better when the Seelie are occupying them. He feels claustrophobic: it’s been days since he’s been aboveground, breathed fresh air. It’s been days since the sun touched his skin.

His stumbling passage towards the surface is marked. The hallways are _interfered_ with: slowly, Pete realizes they no longer lead where they ought to. He’s going in circles, wending deeper underground as he moves towards the exits, til he ends up in the hall that dead-ends at Eloissine’s bedchamber. This is place he has never wanted to go.

He stares blankly at the ruby red door with its nauseating handle of spiked iron. He tries to turn around and runs into the flat of Nassara’s sword. He’s on the other end of her sword more than you’d imagine, if you subscribed to the human usage of the term _friend_. The knight looms behind him looking grim. More grim than usual, even. She says nothing—no warning, no apology—just uses the edge of her enormous blade to force him forwards. He trips into Eloissine’s door, which swings open. He falls over the threshold as Nassara shoves him again.

He looks up at his fearsome Queen from his hands and knees, laid low in the dirt. _Where you belong, where you belong._

“I would command you to kneel, but I see you already crawl,” Eloissine says boredly. She stands over him, dark and crackling with her incandescent eyes and burning crown. Instead of her armor, she is wrapped in a spidersilk dressing gown. What is reveals of her body is unnerving and unnatural to eyes accustomed to the human form.

Pete never forgets that coming here is dangerous. Pete never forgets it is only by his lady’s favor he is permitted to leave. It is hard for him to grovel appropriately while he would rather curse, but he was made here. He loves her still.

“I thank you for your gracious hospitality,” he rasps. He hasn’t been sleeping. He looks as rough as he sounds. He knows the expression of gratitude will annoy her but it’s the most civil thing he can think to say. There are limits to Pete’s self-control. Like, so many limits.

“Yet you would leave us, barely bloodied after so few nights of revel! You are the most capricious of my knights, Peter. Who is it that calls you always out of my reach?”

That is a question Pete must not answer. He must never give her Patrick’s name. Instead he says something he has used in the past to distract her. He says, “I glorify you and all your court, Your Magnificence, by leading revels across the world.”

Eloissine sniffs dismissively. “Revels for humans and unbound fae! You glorify yourself.”

“Always I travel into territories of other courts. I bring songs from your halls to hang over their lands. Every fae that lays eyes or eyes on me is chilled by your reach, your greatness. Would you rather I labor to frighten only those creatures here, who already well know to fear you?”

This is a conversation they have had before. Pete knows she likes having it—likes Pete to play the traveling pet, a public figure who carries her mark out into the world. Fae do not often have the scope or perspective to see beyond their own borders, the petty land disputes they spill their lives for, a diverting end to the tedium of immortality. It is humans who are preoccupied with global influence. So Pete offers her something other fae do not possess, even as he flatters her; he gives her an advantage that royals with fully fae courtiers lack. He knows she just wants him to bow and scrape. He knows there is a trap, but it is something else.

Pete decides to face the threat on his feet. He rises to his knees and quick as a cobra, Eloissine’s heavy greaved boot slams into his chin. He falls bloody-faced back into the dirt, stares up at her. He puts a hand to his mouth, pulls fingers back slick with his own blood. He watches it drip from his fingers to the floor. Eloissine’s floors are yellow-white enamel, evocative of teeth, he notes. The blood makes a striking contrast.

“Tell me the name,” Eloissine croons, crouching over him. She is more horrible when she speaks softly than when she bites out cold commands.

“What name?” Pete’s face hurts when he moves it to talk. It hurts when it’s still. Pete _hurts_. He knows what name. He’s trying to buy time against the pressure of her compulsion. She is his liege; she has his oath and his true name. He cannot resist for long.

“The name of the one you love.” The Queen is practically purring, now. The scent of blood in the water. She knows she’s close.

She’s wrong, though. This is a question Pete can answer. Faeries are so black and white. They do not comprehend the complexities and capacities of human love.

He doesn’t like himself much, for the answer he chooses. The weight of her compulsion is burning, blinding. His lips are moving, his teeth scraping, his chin bleeding. He must speak. He _will_ speak.

The only thing Pete knows anymore is that he cannot say _Patrick_. His mouth opens of its own accord and he says another true thing. He says, “Ashlee.”

*

When Eloissine’s power releases his tongue, he says too, “Don’t hurt her.”

He says, “It’s not her fault.”

He says, “Blame me. The thing about me is that you should always blame me. I want your word, for everything I’ve ever done in your name—I want your promise. Promise you won’t hurt her.”

Eloissine is frowning at him, her head tipped to the side in a perfect facsimile of human confusion. “So stupid, to show so much that you care. You know better than this, surely?”

“Check the tabloids,” Pete says bitterly. “You’ll see. I’m in love with her and the whole fucking world’s got opinions about it. And I’m asking you, and all the creatures you command, not to hurt her.”

Eloissine straightens, standing, and affects a pout. The distance instantly makes Pete feels safer. The carrion stench of the room lessens. He rubs at the bloody spot on his chin again, using the bright flash of pain to center him, to keep him alert. He doesn’t have to care what happens to him, but it is _so damned reckless_ to be this drunk when he carries the names and faces of the most important people in his world around in his bruised head.

“Very well, Peter,” she says. “No one will hurt her. But I will take her from you.”

Pete flashes on children being snatched from their cradles, hollowed-out monsters being left in their place. His body shudders at the idea of what _taking Ashlee_ might mean. What’s wrong with him, that he said her name? But whose name was he supposed to say?

He can’t protect them.

This whole time, he’s only survived because he gave up on even protecting himself.

“That was a fucking close one,” Nassara mutters in his ear as she frog-marches him out of the hill.

Pete says nothing. Pete has nothing to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU FOR READING GUYS I HOPE YOU LOVE THIS I miss you! I have family in town so I'm not writing as much as I'd like, but knowing you're out here waiting fills me with glow. <3
> 
> Next next next: Gem City. GEM CITY. If u know my Peterick theories u know how I feel about Gem City.


	9. This Is Eternal Summer

Time passes. Pete and Ashlee fight, but not more than usual. Pete and Ashlee break up and get back together, but not more than usual. He starts to relax, insofar as _relax_ is something he ever does. Half-magic, half-not is an anxious state. He always feels it creeping in the air like the iron around him.

They tour like the road will stretch on forever, leading them to wherever they are meant to be. Pete wishes he could stay moving like this for all time. He doesn’t understand why humans past a certain age mistake themselves for trees, put down roots. Home to him is Patrick’s voice. Home to him is the sound of Patrick’s soft breathing while he sleeps three feet away on the bus. He wants to wander like this eternally. When they are on the road, Patrick belongs to him. They belong to each other.

Pete tries not to hover around Patrick. Tries not to touch him where other people might see. Tries not to touch him at all, although this is impossible. He doesn’t know where Eloissine has spies or all the ways she might be watching. The push-and-pull he does, coming near and jerking away again, makes Patrick grumpy with him. They fight, but not more than usual.

Pete sleeps with other people. A few more than usual. He’s trying _really_ very hard to keep his hands off Patrick.

It doesn’t work.

*

April 23, 2006. Tonight they’re playing Dayton. Dayton has always felt a little magical to Pete, which he recognizes as a preposterous thing to say about Ohio, but he thinks the locals must feel it too, or its nickname never would have stuck.

They’ve started writing their next album, even though they’re spending all day sleeping off last night’s show and driving to tomorrow’s. Pete is trying to spill his whole self out onto the stage, into the music. He’s playing himself out at a frenetic pace, anxious to be used up. Maybe if he tries hard enough, maybe if he pushes, he can make a miracle come out of his messed-up head.

Pete carries football-folded notebook pages in his pockets, worrying at them and rubbing their edges soft and denim-colored, fuzzing them up with the inside of his hoodies and the tight sweaty pockets of his skinny jeans. He writes _pattycakes_ on them, draws pictures and geometric designs, experiments with block letters. Inside there are endless lyrics, burning out of the end of his pen like a candle burning at both ends. He carries them and tries to work up the courage to hand them over to Patrick.

Sometimes he does. Other times he slips them into Patrick’s own pockets when Patrick falls asleep. Whenever it’s Pete’s turn to drive the bus, he makes Patrick sit with him. He likes to watch sunsets and streetlights streak Patrick’s sleeping face. Patrick is a notoriously sleepy passenger. Other times, Pete flicks them out the bus window or into garbage cans at venues all over the country. He’s Peter Pan, he’s a changeling that won’t grow up, that refuses to be changed back. He’s never claimed to be courageous.

He passes Patrick a folded square of song fragments today. “At least one of these has got to be a chorus,” he says.

Later, Pete is wandering aimless in the parking lot of a rest area. They’re on their way to Dayton, their next city, their next show. The venue isn’t ready for them, the show’s not for hours, they still have seventy-five miles to go. They have nowhere else to be. Patrick brings the square back to him, stabbing the creased sheet with his finger—stabbing at one particular cluster of unwise words.

_baby, seasons change but people don’t_

_and I’ll always be waiting in the back room_

_don’t pretend you ever forgot about me_

 

“Is this for me?”

Given all the words he’s written for Patrick, all the words he’s kissed into Patrick’s neck and lips and eyelids just as often as Patrick and his conscience have allowed it—given all the crumpled notebook pages he’s ever slid to Patrick across silent tables, given all the things he’s made Patrick sing in garages, on stages, in amphitheaters, in seedy bars, into studio mics and video cameras—given all of that, _all of that_. These are the words Patrick has chosen to question. These are the words about which Patrick has chosen to ask, _is this for me._

Pete’s dodged a bullet and walked into one at once.

“It’s in the note I wrote for you.” Pete skates along the edge of the truth. He does not often wish he was able to lie. He is not sure if this is one of those times.

“That’s not what I asked,” Patrick says. Shit and willow. He knows Pete perilously well. “I’m asking, did you write lyrics to me that you’re planning to make me sing back to you, so that the words of _your_ love song come out of _my_ mouth?”

Pete swallows hard. When questions are so specific and detailed, they become difficult to skirt. He tries to dodge instead. “I don’t think I’m comfortable answering that question,” he says. Sticking to the truth.

“That’s not what I asked either,” Patrick says.

Pete opens his mouth and closes it again. He squeezes his eyes shut and presses his palms to his eye sockets, trying to squeeze the world back into sensible focus. Eyeliner imprints are left on his hands when Patrick pulls them away.

Patrick holds his hands in between them, that damned sheet of paper rubbing on Pete’s skin.

“I do like it when you sing your own love songs,” Pete admits in a miserable whisper. He can’t quite breathe when Patrick looks at him like this. When Patrick’s so _close_. “You’ve never said anything about it before. I thought I had… lyrics immunity.”

“Words! I’ve had enough of you and your words, Peter.” Patrick’s voice is stern but his eyes sparkle, twin blue-green grins. His hands are warm and wonderful on Pete’s.

“What would you like instead?” Pete, eternally the flirt, can hardly believe how wanton it comes out when he says it.

“I’d like to find a back room and stop pretending I ever forgot about you,” Patrick says. Slow, deliberate, his voice sexy with indulgence. His face opening, the light shining out.

Their mouths meet. Gods and kings, their _mouths_. Patrick kisses life between Pete’s lips, opens Pete’s mouth with his tongue, presses what feels like five years of pent-up desire into Pete’s lungs and throat and heart and blood. It’s the car crash all over again, this kiss. Pete melts, stumbles back into the side of the bus. Patrick follows, pressing Pete into the metal, the singeing of which Pete can’t quite care about. His clothes and his glamour will protect him from any serious burns. The only things that matter are the heat and weight of Patrick pressing against him, their hands trapped uselessly between their bodies, their mouths, oh those mouths, meeting, meeting. The late April air cool but hopeful all around them, for once all the lust and longing fraught between them freed for all to see.

That night, after the show, with utmost reverence, they undress each other in a hotel room. Pete cannot stop trembling. He has never wanted anything like he wants this. He prays with his hands on Patrick’s naked skin, his lips taking Patrick’s pulse: may this moment last forever. May this moment be his eternity. May this moment be—

But the last one isn’t something he has to pray for. This moment _is_ everything.

At last, at last, Pete and Patrick have sex, and it remakes everything. In Gem City they turn the tide.

*

It only takes one night of collapsing in Patrick’s arms gasping, the taste of Patrick in his mouth and their bodies damp from their exertions—it only takes one night of laughing against Patrick’s chest, playing with Patrick’s hair like it’s his to tangle, savoring the maze of movements Patrick’s hands waltz over his back, for Pete to be _hooked_. Patrick is a particularly strong cut of heroin. Pete is fucking wrecked.

They lay awake most of the night, touching each other wonderingly, like they’re equally amazed to be allowed. “If you wanted to touch me all this time, you could have,” Pete says muzzily, breaking away from a kiss that feels like their first and also their thousandth to try to catch his breath. Patrick makes time skip and skid just like the fae do. Patrick is the fruit from fairy tales, the pomegranate from the afterlife. It only takes one bite.

“You come too close as a way of staying out of reach,” Patrick says. He says it sleepy, casual, kissed senseless. He says it naked, despoiled, defenseless. It is so alarmingly perceptive that Pete wants to scuttle underneath something, out of the light. It doesn’t make a difference that it’s dark in the room.

“We’re one soul in two bodies,” Patrick says after a few beats. He can feel Pete shifting uncomfortably, can maybe even feel Pete’s heart speed inside his chest. “I _know_ you, Pete Wentz. You only think you’re hiding.”

Pete has felt this way about Patrick for—fuck, for years. It has never occurred to him Patrick might feel it too. He outlines Patrick’s ribs with careful hands. He studies the pattern of Patrick’s freckles to avoid looking at his face. Pete is worried about what else Patrick has seen.

Pete is worried about what else has seen him with Patrick.

“What if I’m hiding because being it’s dangerous to be seen?” It is so hard to find the right words. Patrick is right _here_ , his stomach and thighs soft against Pete’s body, blood stirring and swirling and responding to whatever Pete’s hands care to do. How can Pete try and warn him away when all he’s wanted for so many years is for Patrick to be closer?

“I know you think you’re a monster,” Patrick says. He rolls suddenly, pinning Pete underneath him so Pete is forced to meet his eyes. If they could live in this hotel room, Pete thinks. If they could swim in their sins forever. If the rest of his life could just be sex and songs with Patrick. If, if, if. “Do you trust me?”

“Like no one else.”

“Then trust me when I’m choosing you. Trust that, even if you don’t see it, even if it doesn’t make sense to you, I know what’s good for me. I know what I’m asking. I know what I’m getting.”

Patrick looks so beautiful, so serious, that Pete can’t bear to say, _it’s me you shouldn’t trust._ He understands that this would directly undermine what Patrick’s saying.

It is a potentially deadly misunderstanding. Patrick thinks it’s only their hearts and reputations on the line. But Pete. Pete has never had anything go quite right, has never been permitted entrance to anyplace he might belong. Even Pete can’t make himself ruin this.

“I trust you,” Pete says. Patrick lowers his head and kisses Pete, sweet and true as love, on the lips. They don’t talk about faeries or Ashlee or miracles or the press or the band. Instead, they spend the night talking with their bodies. Saying all the things they never dared to say before.

*

That’s the first night.

It’s not the last.

It feels like there never has to be a last.

They spend all summer tangled up together. Pete is too happy to be careful. His heart is a bowl, overflowing with light.

*

Joe’s saying, “So you know we have to ask.” Pete is in his bunk with the shade pulled, and it’s a weird time of day for him to be on the bus awake and alone, and probably they don’t realize he’s in there, and the polite thing to do would be to announce himself, but then he hears Andy’s voice too, and Andy says, “You and Pete?”

Pete does not announce himself.

Pete turns to stone. Sometimes, at least in those moments when they aren’t frenetic as moths burning their lives out, fae can be very, very still.

Patrick’s response, a guilty protest, sets a chill in Pete’s skin. “I don’t ask you about what you do in your spare time!”

Joe’s voice again, gentle. “Well, but we don’t do _Pete_ in our spare time, bud.”

Pete’s fingernails are clawing at his skin without his permission. He’s not making a lot of decisions here. Pete tries to pull a glamour around his curtain, a buffer to muffle the sound of his breathing. The air takes on a murky purple sheen inside his dark bunk. It’s hard to tell, without making a sound, whether the magic is working. Pete’s always been better with words and wounds than wizardry and wards.

“You know what our friendship means to me. Has always meant to me,” says Patrick. Pete’s heart, the one Patrick pressed into his chest with tenderness, hammers harder. He knew he had to worry about Eloissine, her soldiers, her spies. He didn’t know he had to worry about his bandmates too.

He guesses it’s only fair. Over the years, he’s made them do a lot of worrying about him.

“I’ve known Pete for a long time,” Andy says. “Pete means a lot to me, too. But, Patrick... he’s still _Pete.”_

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Patrick’s voice is frosty, but Pete knows he took the meaning. Pete knows he’s reckless, unreliable, a risk. If they only knew.

“Sometimes, he gets… with a new thing… when he’s excited. He’s very intense. He makes you feel like anything is possible, like you’ll rise and rise until you’re actually a comet, splintering out of the atmosphere and burning a streak across the sky. Like you’re the most important thing in the world, like he revolves around you.”

“I didn’t know you were such a poet, Joe,” Andy cuts in.

“What I’m saying is, we all feel it. That’s why he’s our, you know, resident tortured genius. His energy and his fire and his quick, clever, messed-up brain. He sold us on a pop punk hardcore band, didn’t he? In a lot of ways he made all of this happen. He can make you feel… endless. Like you can do anything.”

“And then, sometimes, he gets… distracted,” Andy adds.

“His eye is caught by the next thing,” says Joe.

“And sometimes things… people… they get forgotten.”

“Rollercoasters don’t just go up. They go down, too.”

There is a long, brittle silence.

Joe, in a rush, sounding anxious: “I’m happy—when you’re happy, I’m happy. But I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“To see the band get hurt,” says Andy.

Then the final nail in Pete’s fucking coffin, so gently from Joe’s mouth: “Isn’t he still with Ashlee too?”

*

Pete stands in the shower and watches the blood run. The way it swirls down the drain, carried away, makes him feel clean—makes his self feel scrubbed, settled. He’s scour out his insides with oven cleaner if he could. He’d spray it down his throat without hesitation if he thought it would help. If he thought his lungs might burn up faster than they could stuff him full of charcoal.

No, no, no. Pete stands in the shower and watches the blood run. This is a ritual—this soap-scrubbed, blood-swirl baptism. This is how he gets the Unseelie off, when he wants to slip back into his daytime life, his sunlight self. This is what he does after battle or bloodshed. He picks leaves out of his hair, rinses mud out of the scrapes in his elbows, scrubs someone else’s scabs off his skin. Afterwards, boiled red by the pleasant heat and pressure, he wraps himself in a clean towel and allows himself to pretend everything is all right in the world. That everything is all right in him.

Today it’s a little different.

No one compelled him to pick up his sword and hack out parts of someone else’s life. He feels filthy because of the person he is, the _thing_ he’s become. There was no blood from battle to wash away, so Pete drew some of his own. The cuts aren’t very deep. He just wanted to watch blood run. He wanted the chance to feel clean, when it was done.

It’s not working.

Pete’s considering more blood.

Then the bathroom door is swinging open. When they’re sharing a bus or a hotel room, it’s easier not to lock doors. There have been actual wars over sink use before. It can get ugly. There’s not a lot left to hide anyway, when you’ve lived on the road or in a crap apartment with as little money and comfort as they have. There is no manner of disgusting thing they haven’t seen each other do. So Pete figures someone’s coming in to use the toilet or the sink, and he’s glad he wasn’t caught razor-handed, and he wouldn’t think more of it than that, except that someone says:

“Andy and Joe were saying shit about you.” His voice, because of course it’s Patrick’s voice, sounds thick and angry. It sounds like he’s been crying. “I’m mad as hell. Can I come in?”

Patrick’s pushing back the curtain and climbing into the shower before he’s even finished the question. He’s wearing a t-shirt, underwear, and a trucker hat. Given all of this, Pete is not sure why he even bothered to take off his jeans. His eyes are red and swollen. He’s frowning miserably. He definitely has been crying.

Pete hopes the bleeding’s stopped and pulls Patrick to him. He will never forgive himself if, when he touches Patrick, he leaves a stain. He wraps his arms around the younger man and holds him, wet and naked, boiling in the hot water. Half-clothed and sniffling, Patrick holds on to Pete like he’s an anchor.

“I don’t want to stop,” Patrick says into Pete’s shoulder. The water drums into the brim of his cap like rain on a roof. “I don’t care what they think. I don’t care if you hurt me.”

“They have good reasons for thinking shit about me, Trick.” Patrick squeezes Pete tighter, pushing out the truer words: “I don’t want to stop either.”

“It can just be… it can just be something we do, can’t it? It can just be amazing and fun? We don’t have to, like, make it a _big deal_. We don’t have to change our lives or jeopardize our band. We can just… have this? If we want to?”

Pete doesn’t know what’s truth or a lie anymore. He opens his mouth and decides to trust to fae logic that whatever comes out must be the truth, or his tongue wouldn’t form the words. “We can have anything we want,” he says.

Hearing it, knowing that it must be true, unclenches something in Pete’s chest. He moves his embracing arms lower, peeling wet t-shirt up at the hem, working his hands under it, petting Patrick’s stomach and back and chest and hips. “Off,” Pete says into Patrick’s ear, tugging at the t-shirt. “Clothes _off_ in the shower.”

Clothes come off. Hands and mouths move. Condoms come in. Patrick fucks Pete, water stinging both their eyes, with desperation. With the fear of loss. Pete doesn’t even try to hold himself in check. He makes all the noise he wants to. He hopes like hell Joe and Andy can hear them through the walls.

They both burn up like comets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys _look_ it is a HAPPY CHAPTER, it's really possible! Yes, sometimes happiness includes fae creatures using self-harm to feel real. Joy is complex. It has a back edge. 
> 
> Bless you all for reading. I hope you love it! Except you, Pete Wentz. If you're reading this I'm just so sorry.


	10. I've Found The Cure To Growing Older

The tour ends and leaves Pete cold. He goes back to an apartment he’s sharing with Ashlee (he’s supposed to refer to it as _home_ ) and still wants to see Patrick every day. He calls him and tells him on the phone regularly. “Come over,” Pete’s always saying. “Let’s watch a movie, let’s go for a walk. Tell me what you dreamed about. Tell me what you’re thinking right now. Tell me every thought you’ve ever had. Sing for me. Patrick, I can’t sleep. Come over, come over.”

“Can you make it like, even five hours without calling me?” Patrick asks once. It’s the middle of the night. They’re on the phone. Patrick is only pretending to be annoyed.

“If you were here I wouldn’t have to call you,” Pete points out. He’s sitting in his dark kitchen, staring out the window over the sink. He goes very still when cars drive by. He wonders where they’re going at this hour. He wonders if they’re full of Petes on their way to Patricks. He itches to get in his own car and follow their example.

“You’re the one who moved out first,” Patrick counters. “We could all still be living in that horrible shithole. Together all hours of the day. Absolutely no relief.”

“Could we?” Pete can’t keep the eagerness out of his late-night voice. He doesn’t sleep half as much as everyone else seems to, and not for not needing it. He’s just not very good at being still during the dark hours. Unseelie fae and other monsters come out at night. It is careless to be caught sleeping.

He likes it on tour, where no one thinks it’s strange he sleeps all day. In real life, which feels more like a game you’d play as a kid than a tenable daily ritual to perform for the next sixty-odd years, you are expected to Rise At A Decent Hour and Drink Coffee With Your Girlfriend and Keep Press Appearances and Socialize With Peers. On tour, if Pete wakes up before noon, it’s only to crawl into Patrick’s bunk and fall back asleep with his face buried in Patrick’s neck and Patrick’s arm flung across him.

“No. Not after you made that peephole in my door. I never have to live with you again. I’m far too successful to need deadbeat roommates.” Patrick’s teasing, but _deadbeat_ rings too true. On tour or in the studio, Pete knows what he is supposed to do every day. There are songs to write and interviews to give and stages on which to perform. In real life, this game of make-believe, he drifts. He watches TV on his couch. He shops for elaborate gifts that people always receive oddly. He refuses to learn how to cook anything other than pancakes. He gets bored and mean and squabbles with whoever happens to be around him. He walks his dog for hours, until even Hemmy is ready to go home.

He runs a clothing line, a record label. It’s not enough. His brain gets bored and springy, his thoughts grasshoppers: when there are too many they turn into locusts, they eat his bones dry. They devour everything around him. He makes friends with up-and-coming musicians, goes to their shows. He networks. He appears in tabloids and magazines.

It’s all terribly dull. It makes him understand why the fae would rather fight an arbitrary, endless war than face a meaningless eternity. Nothing means anything unless he’s with Patrick.

“Tell me again when we go back to the studio,” Pete says.

“Third week in September,” Patrick tells him, like he always does. This is Pete’s favorite lullaby. He calls Patrick almost every night to hear it.

Today’s the first time he realizes, though, that the third week in September is the week of the autumnal equinox.

He’ll have to battle first. He’ll have to join the fray of fae under the hill, the violence of the changeover. Then, provided no one kills him, he can shower for hours til the water runs clear, til the blood is finally off, and run away to LA. To sunshine and safety.

“I miss you,” he tells Patrick.

“I miss you more,” Patrick tells him back.

Patrick waits until Pete’s home alone. Then he comes over.

*

For a while, Pete doesn’t have to do anything harder than keep his hands off Patrick when someone might see.

Their lips always swollen, their grins contagious and full of secrets shared. The rest of the world doesn’t stand a chance. They are so, so happy.

*

Recording _Infinity_ is nothing like battle at all. Pete’s lying by the pool, sunning himself like a colder-blooded creature, and Patrick is reading a book with his feet dangling in the warm water. There are palm trees all around. The Chicago forecast is calling for _chance of snow_. It is good to be in California, to breathe its strange magic-soaked air. The wind in Chicago, the smell of leaves, it always feels like Patrick, to Pete. Autumn in Chicago is not just the bruising equinox, it’s longing. Pete can’t coax his not-quite-heart to beat for anything but Patrick, when that wind brushes his neck like Patrick’s breath, when the leaves and sweater-smells and steaming coffee evoke red-gold hair and winter-sky eyes.

In LA, there’s none of that. There are no seasons. Time neither passes nor accrues. He lies with Patrick by the pool.

Pete took a few minor wounds in the battle of the equinox. He surveys them while Patrick takes a phone call. Pete prods his cracked ribs experimentally, digging his finger into the center of the spreading purple contusion that shows where his blood rushed to the errant rescue. He uses his fingertips to trace the scores on his side where a shapeshifter’s claws split his armor and his skin. For a moment, through the tears, he glimpsed green-brown flesh: the real color, his real skin, underneath the glamour. Then the blood rushed in and the challenge had to be answered and he didn’t look again til it was already scabbed. His breath quickens now, an automatic fear response, just remembering the fight he’d been in. Like every fight he’s ever been in, he spun with his sword and lashed out with boot and fist and cut down everything he possibly could, with no thought to the damages, the loss of life, the identity of who he was swinging at.

Pete doesn’t like fighting very much anymore.

Pete’s snapped from his unhappy reverie when Patrick drops his body into the chair next to Pete’s. He gives overmuch to gravity, which is his tell: Patrick goes boneless in misery.

Pete no longer has any thoughts for scrapes, bruises, bad memories, or the nightmares they lead to. His whole world narrows down to Patrick, a sensation so familiar as to hold its own comfort. “What happened?” he asks. He cannot keep the urgency out of his voice. Anything causing Patrick distress is a crisis situation, and Pete will challenge it in hand-to-hand combat if he can.

“We broke up,” Patrick says. Even obscured by sunglasses, Pete can see his face is scrunched against tears. This girl, this often-long-distance on-again off-again girl of his, Pete has never trusted her. Pete has heard stories about what she does when they’re on tour, and who she does it with. But Pete has never mentioned this to Patrick. He knows how it would sound, coming from him.

Anyway, girls are another layer of protection, between him and Patrick and whoever’s watching. Girls are another thing that might somehow keep Patrick safe. That might keep headless fucking ravens out of his bed, even if they can’t quite ward off Pete.

Pete is on Patrick’s lounge chair without ever deciding to make the move. He wriggles in beside Patrick, shoving his friend when necessary to make the space. Their solar-charged, sunscreened bodies touch, and Pete is struck by how little a man is wearing, really, when he’s in swim trunks. And Pete Wentz knows a thing or two about nudity. He shivers, feeling the opposite of cold.

Patrick lies on his back, squinting up at the sun in a way that makes it impossible to tell if he’s blinded or crying. Pete props himself on an elbow, on his side on the sliver of chair Patrick has yielded, and looks down at his golden boy.

“I am full of sorrow for you,” Pete says. He is trying very hard not to put his hands on Patrick. He is trying very hard to be respectful of Patrick’s grief and quash the part of himself feeling treacherously giddy about a barrier removed.

Patrick shifts, snuggling a little closer to Pete. From shoulder to ankle they’re touching. Heat radiates between their skins. Pete wonders what Patrick would be, if he peeled back the glamour. Hawthorn and lily, his life would be easier if the effect Patrick has on him could be explained away by glamour.

“We had a… hard time with the last tour. We were just on the road for so long, you know? Of course you know, you’ve got Ash.” Patrick sighs unhappily. “But the last two months were so _good_ , I thought…”

“What did she say?” Pete asks gently.

Patrick drops his hand over his face, covering what the sunglasses do not. “She’s dropping my stuff at my mom’s house. When we’re done recording, I have to find a new place. She says it’s her apartment anyway, with me gone so much. She’s not wrong. It didn’t feel like home. A shitty bus feels like home, the apartment I’m sharing with my girlfriend feels like a place I store my extra guitars. What the fuck is _wrong_ with me?”

“Nothing’s wrong with you. I feel that way too.” Pete is treading on thin ice. He should get to thicker ice. But he is so, so curious about what it would feel like to fall in. If all the painful fractured ice gave at once and finally, they could just— _drown_ in each other.

“That is not a fucking comfort, Pete Wentz,” Patrick groans. “You are like, the poster boy for maladjustment in adulthood. What if I _want_ to grow up?”

“We’re the Lost Boys,” Pete says sagely. “If we grow up, we have to leave magic and wonder behind.”

“And murderous pirates and man-eating crocodiles,” Patrick adds under his breath.

“Run away with me, Patrick.” Without deciding to, Pete has taken Patrick’s hand, not caring who else is by the pool. Patrick has let him. “The open road will be our home. We’ll live in the bus and play at rest stops for gas money. We’ll have the whole country for our address. We will find every weird, mystical piece of Americana that’s out there and roll around in it til we’re buzzing with kitsch power. We’ll build a castle out of a tour bus and we’ll never grow old. We can stay young forever, and stay together, and winter will never come again.”

Patrick is laughing. This is not the reaction Pete intended, but he likes it better than scrunched sad-faced Patrick. “Like the Mid-America Windmill Museum Andy wanted to stop at? And the World’s Largest Landfill?”

“And the park in Kentucky with all those wire-and-plaster dinosaurs that totally come alive at night,” Pete adds, getting into the spirit of it. Why not an eternal road trip? Anything is better going home, than going through the motions of whoever he’s supposed to be this week. “Yes. It will all be our kingdom. Just run away with me.”

Patrick snuggles against Pete’s chest, causing Pete’s non-heart to skip three to four beats. He hopes Patrick doesn’t feel it. “I’ll think about it,” Patrick says. “I think I need to be sad for a while, though. Before you crown me Prince Americana and we run away from it all.”

“Feeling the pain _before_ you run away isn’t the point at all,” Pete says. He says it tenderly, holding Patrick’s hand, face warmed from the sun reflecting off of Patrick’s hair. He feels on the verge of saying or doing something very stupid indeed. Seriously, the best case scenario is that he develops an emotions-boner and his swim trunks give it all away. They’ve been unofficially fucking for a few months, now—tender, shimmering, precious months. Every time Patrick kisses him Pete thinks, _this is it, this is the happiest I will ever be_ , until Patrick kisses him again and he realizes his error.

Pete doesn’t want to spoil it with words. Pete doesn’t want to say or do anything that might make one of them come to their senses.

This is a moment he has to destroy, before it poses a risk to either of them. Before he opens his mouth and says for the hundredth time, _I’m in love with you, Patrick_ , hoping and fearing Patrick will be able to tell he means it. Before he opens his mouth and fills it with Patrick’s for all the world to see.

Pete springs into action. He scoops Patrick up, like he’s going to carry him over the threshold of their home on their wedding day, and hurls him yelping into the pool.

“ _ABSOLUTELY FUCK YOU!_ ” Patrick starts yelling as soon as he breaks the surface, gasping and spitting out the water he’s inhaled. He claws his way up the side of the pool and wraps a slick hand around Pete’s ankle. He tugs, not carrying if Pete ends up in the pool or eating a faceful of concrete. For a stumbling second Pete’s lurching forward in free fall, totally at the mercy of gravity, and then Patrick pulls again and Pete’s feet lose traction and he’s windmilling backwards into the pool. He has a millisecond to grin, huge and whole-not-quite-hearted and bright enough to rival the sun.  He feels so _happy_.

Then he hits the water and goes under. In LA it is always summer, and the world is wet and wonderful.

*

They are filming the _Arms Race_ video. The film set is a spectacularly indiscreet time and place to have sex with Patrick. Rationally, Pete is aware of this.

Practically: Pete’s in bruise makeup and dark eyeliner with no shirt on, and Patrick—Patrick is dressed like a sexy raven dictator, irresistible from hat to feathers. They kiss in the hotel room set, white pillow feathers flying; then they jump on the bed, grinning helpless, while the cameras roll. They kiss when Pete’s got the fake moustache on, and Patrick won’t stop making fun of him. Pete kisses down Patrick’s neck, making him squeal with protest that the ‘stache scratches. After Pete does the shot with the cell phone photos, unzipping his hoodie and letting his honest, keen self-loathing showing plain on his face, they don’t kiss; Patrick just holds him. What Pete wants to say with this video is, _I feel so used and so useless. This band is the only good thing in my life, and you’re trying to make a circus out of that too. I don’t care if no one wants us, if we don’t belong. We belong with each other. We want each other_.

After the funeral scene they kiss again.

This time they don’t quite _stop_ kissing.

Patrick’s tongue in Pete’s mouth ripples through him, pouring through his body with the gold sluggishness of honey, uncoiling through his belly and lighting up his groin.

Around them, just on the other side of flimsy film studio walls, the Des Moines hotel room set is being prepped. On this side of the wall, Pete is on his back and Patrick is kneeling over him, his tie loosened, his shirt open, his dictator jacket stripped. Pete’s fumbling with Patrick’s zipper. He keeps getting tangled with the charmed chain hanging from Patrick’s pants.

“Come on, come on,” Patrick moans into Pete’s mouth, kissing his cheeks and chin and jaw, taking shuddering breaths that rock both their bodies. “I _need_ —!” At this moment, neither of them can finish a coherent sentence. Finally, the zipper: Patrick’s cock is in Pete’s hand. Now neither of them can even start one.

By the time Pete’s called for the shot of him waking up in a shitty motel in 2003, no spritzing is required to make him look smeared and sweaty. Patrick has just made him come so hard his legs will barely support his walk onto the set.

Pete collapses onto the bed and adopts a sleepy smile with no need to act. When he jerks ‘awake,’ sweaty and gasping, he’s only imitating the breaths and expressions Patrick was making moments ago.

It’s not quite a perfect happiness.

Its thrill makes secrecy no less a strain. It wears on them, hiding and lying, rolling indiscreet behind closed doors and then straightened clothes and dimming smiles as they try not to just fucking stare at each other, beaming. Trying not to kiss or hold hands or touch at all. (Patrick is better at this charade than Pete is.) Acting like what they have doesn’t exist, pretending it doesn’t touch their lives or change their worlds: it hurts them both. And Pete, who cannot lie like Patrick can, is starting to find it the act a little too convincing.

It’s not quite perfect happiness, but… it’s the closest Pete has ever been.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys I'm super Blocked and I can't tell if it's true writer's block TM or if I'm just being lazy and anyway, I appreciate any encouragement or things you do to trick yourself into writing when it gets hard. Tomorrow I'm trying Operation: Notebook at the Beach (No Cell Phones for Filthy Procrastinators). Will report back.


	11. Put Your Hand Between An Aching Head and An Aching World

_Infinity_ blows up. Pete is no closer to working a miracle. Album sales of 260,000 copies in one week, topping Billboard charts and landing in the top five worldwide, is not considered _miraculous_ by the dictates of the Chicagoland Unseelie court. _Apparently_.

On tour, they belong to each other, without discussion or reservation.

It isn’t enough.

Pete wakes up, sometimes, with raven feathers on his pillow. They glow with tiny needled messages in an untrained scrawl, saying things like _be careful_ or _eyes are on you_ or _stop or he will die_. He flushes them down the toilet or buries them in the dirt of cities across America, leaving a trail of threads and threats. He pushes them out of his mind.

It isn’t enough.

They go to Asia. The plane, that tube of metal whistling through the atmosphere, aloft by means more impossible than magic, makes Pete sick. Patrick sits on the sink in the tiny airplane bathroom while Pete chokes and coughs and vomits into the black sucking toilet. It is awkward; they don’t quite fit. Pete leans his shoulders into Patrick’s legs where they hang down. Patrick folds himself in half to stroke Pete’s hair, to rub his back, to give him comfort.

“Did you just throw up a _leaf_?” Patrick asks. “Pete, what the hell have you been eating? No wonder you’re sick.”

“I got nervous about the plane,” Pete says, which is neither a lie nor related to Patrick’s question. He’s been on airplanes before, of course, but never for so many hours. The arches of his feet ache for the feel of the earth. He wonders if he’ll be okay, overseas. On foreign earth. He wonders if it will be like boot camp, or when he’s away from Chicago for too long, or the way he got while they were in LA recording _Cork Tree_. He hates being so unreliable. Fickle, mercurial—just like a faerie. Just like the Folk he came from.

“Okay, well, please don’t express your nerves by eating foliage next time, baby,” Patrick says.

Pete goes still under Patrick’s stroking hand. “Did you just call me _baby_?” he asks, incredulous. Teasing. Awfully bold for a man with his head in a vacuum toilet.

Patrick abruptly stops offering comfort. “Pretty sure I said _asshole_ ,” he says.

“Whatever you say, baby boy. My darling. Sweetheart. Sugar. Lovey. Peaches. Puppy. Schnookums.”

Patrick kicks Pete gently in the ribs, laughing. “God! I come in here with you, I let everyone on this whole plane think we’re having, like, marathon sex in the grossest possible public venue, I _comfort you lovingly_ , and this is what I get? Fucking _schnookums_? Remind me never to be kind to you again.”

Teasing Patrick is distracting Pete from the terrible, scraping feeling of hollowing-out that he is feeling, from the dizzy choking sickness of all this metal that he’s breathing. “Are you propositioning me right now? Because I’m not sure if I’m up to it but I’m willing to try.”

Patrick shoves Pete again with his legs. “Stop!” he laughs. The sound of his laugh is second only to the sound of his singing. It is pure light.

“I’m just saying, ‘grossest possible public sex venue’ sounds like a challenge,” Pete goes on, grinning into the pressurized suction hole of this hideous toilet. “You know I like to be challenged. _Baby_.”

“I hope you puke up the whole tree next,” Patrick tells him darkly. “ _Asshole_.”

*

In fact, Japan is incredible. He doesn’t feel sick on the foreign soil at all. Instead, Pete is surprised to find the whole cramped continent _roiling_ with magic—just not any kind he’s ever felt before. He feels brave, strong, a little stupid. It’s wonderful, to just spend a week or two not feeling so stretched-out and _worried_ all the time.

In Japan there are red dismembered hands hanging nonthreateningly from cherry blossom trees, ghostly octopi and shimmering koi fish swimming in puddles and fountains, child-shaped spirits that come out to play in the rain, trees that are vampires. There are minor demons and goddesses demanding sake and luminescent birds that stalk through crowded squares and respectfully sidestep sacred spaces. When they visit a rocky beach, Pete sees the ghost of a whale’s skeleton drifting in the sea. Joe tells a story of being followed by footsteps in the dark with no one behind him, no one in sight; Andy counters with stories of lanterns, candles, and jars whispering at him when he visits a holy temple. The myths and monsters Pete sees shift and change as they cross provincial boundaries. It is fascinating. Pete seems to fascinate the local wildlife, too: they come out to see him. Pete wonders if they have changelings in Japan, or if he’s the only one.

Pete meets a kitsune, who snaps and hisses at his heels to herd him into an alley, where she slips smokelike into her human shape and kisses him on the mouth, leaving a warning on his tongue. _You cannot stay here. You are being watched._ Pete wants to meet the legendary catfish that causes tsunami, wants to discover whether the spider-women, the jorōgumo, are real. There are more animals and spirits here than he has ever seen in his own Court, his own country. He decides he likes fae better when they are otters, badgers, cats, fish, lizardlike dragons, small bears. He likes the way spirits have homes in Japan, have altars maintained by the humans who believe in them, so that when they slip among the people living there, they don’t have cause quite as much bloodshed—they seem more interested in minor mischief. A woman with two mouths approaches him after a show and asks Pete to follow her down a path of fire, promising it will be pleasant to burn. Pete can detect no evidence of warring Queens or embattled Courts. All the myths and monsters living here seem to have territory they’re satisfied with.

It is all so strange and wonderful, he almost spits in Patrick’s other eye. He knows Patrick has seen some of the spirits—he watched Patrick sidestep to avoid a dog that only Pete should have known was there—but he doesn’t think Patrick knows they’re _yokai_ , faeries. Pete likes to hold Patrick’s hand while they’re sightseeing; he figures there’s no way what he does here will ever get back to the fucking Unseelie Court of the West Suburbs. He’s never even heard or dreamed of fae like these. He’s sure they haven’t heard of him, either. He feels a little bit invincible, the usual amount of reckless.

Pete drags Patrick to the top of the Tokyo Tower. They stand on the terrifying see-through floors and survey the city, so lit up at night. The choke of so much metal buzzes against Pete’s bones, but with Patrick’s hand to hold, he figures he can bear anything. Pete kisses Patrick tenderly; the Tower is mostly abandoned at this time of night.

Patrick looks up at Pete shyly in the dark. “The press,” he warns. “You’re their darling.”

“Haven’t we flown halfway across the world and lost them? Darling?” He hasn’t stopped teasing Patrick with nicknames.

“I don’t think you want to be in a tabloid with me,” Patrick says.

Pete pauses over that one. Firstly, if he has to be in a tabloid at all, he would _love_ if he was there with Patrick instead of being printed next to scandalous falsehoods and references to his goddamn penis. But there is Ash to think of, and Queen Eloissine. Pete’s not sure if she follows human press.

“ _Your_ reputation is not what troubles me, turtledove,” Pete says, nuzzling Patrick’s neck. He’s decided to be unabashed. Patrick blushes, which warms his skin where it touches Pete’s. He does not pull away. “But then again. If you have to be debauched in a tabloid. I would prefer it was because of me.”

Evidently persuaded, Patrick takes Pete’s face between his hands and kisses him, long, hard, and with full tongue in the middle of the Tokyo Tower, illuminated by the busy Tokyo skyline, locked together with longing for all to see. Pete can’t catch his breath. Patrick steals his—everything.

“Yeah, okay,” Patrick says, tucking his forehead against Pete’s chin while he catches his own breath. “Let’s do it.”

“Have sex in the Tokyo Tower?”

Patrick laughs, the sound vibrating through Pete’s chest. “No, idiot. I meant like… appear together.”

 _Fear_. A sharp silver sliver of it, disrupting Pete’s not-quite-perfect happiness. His stupid mouth. Because he can’t, of course. It would mean Patrick’s life. There is no way to explain this without sounding crazy, without going back to the beginning and starting with, _So remember when I asked if you were a faerie_.

Not knowing what to say, Pete doesn’t say anything. He lifts Patrick’s chin, covers Patrick’s mouth with his own lest more words he wants but cannot have come out of it. He takes Patrick in his arms and kisses into him every true thing he cannot say. _I love you, I love you, I can never let you know I mean it._

On this continent, at least, Pete thinks they can have it.

*

It never fails to be fucking spectacular when Pete is wrong.

When they land in the UK, there’s a raven courier waiting for him on the tarmac.

They left Tokyo at dusk and land in London in the cheery light of midmorning. They were on the plane for _twelve hours_. Pete was so green-faced from iron poisoning, he thought, at first glance in the tiny bathroom mirror, that his glamour had come off and he was seeing faerie skin. He doesn’t know why changeling skin would be green. He doesn’t know what type of fae he is, or was; he knows he’s not a green-hued Vulcan because he’s seen his blood and it’s silver-red, same as the blood of every other fae he’s cut up. He’s not proud of it, but he’s got a pretty good sample size.

One of these days, he’ll going to have to strip down his glamour and come face-to-face with whatever he really is. Today he’s just trying to be this, though: notorious, scandalous, stupid in love, pop punk prince Pete Wentz. Who’s been on a plane with mildly poisonous air for the last twelve hours, traveling through time and space, and needs to take a fucking breath.

They walk down the tiny plane staircase, squinting into the sun, stretching their legs on the pleasant sunny runway. He’s not sure how Patrick convinced the pilot to let them out in the fresh air instead of the noxious metallic terminal, but he’s choking on his gratitude. He slings his arm around Patrick’s neck and uses all of his reserve not to kiss him on the mouth. All of his reserve, and also the fact that his mouth still tastes kind of like vomit. Patrick spent a good chunk of those twelve hours sitting with him in the tiny bathroom. Pete is incredibly aware of how little he deserves Patrick.

He’d try to express this, maybe, all while trying to avoid saying _thanks_ , but before he gets the chance a goddamn raven hops up right beside them—unnaturally close for a natural bird. Patrick starts at its arrival. Pete half-heartedly aims a kick at it, but his Chuck swings wide. He doesn’t really want to hurt an innocent bird. Then it caws out, its voice scraping like iron on pavement, _You know you’re supposed to love her._

Pete does not require further clarification. He is in the uncomfortable position of knowing exactly what the raven is talking about. The bird—ravens really are distressingly large creatures to be close to—flies away.

Patrick watches it. “For a moment,” he says, frowning, “it almost sounded like that bird was _speaking_ to you.”

“Well, you know, England,” Pete says numbly. All of a sudden he feels sicker than he did on the plane. “I’m probably wanted at Hogwarts. Slytherin doesn’t stand a chance at the Quidditch Cup without me.”

Joe, last off the staircase, punches Pete hard in the shoulder. His voice holds the particular, chafed annoyance that can only be caused by spending more than half of one’s last 24 hours traveling. “How many fucking times are we gonna have this conversation,” Joe says crabbily. “Wentz, you are a goddamn Gryffindor, and I’m tired of saying it.”

“I will bring in the Sorting Hat itself if it means we never have to talk about this again,” Andy adds, grumbling. “I don’t even _like_ Harry Potter.” He strikes off for the terminal. Patrick squeezes Pete briefly and then lets him go, resettling his backpack on his shoulders and trailing after their bandmates.

For a moment, Pete stands in the blazing morning. He was promised London would be cloudier than this. It is difficult to sulk under such a brilliant sun. He manages it. He knows what he has to do.

He calls Ashlee.

*

Just over a week later, Ashlee meets them in Edinburgh. This would be fine—exciting, even—he loves her, he didn’t lie when he said he loved her, he’s never lied—except that he hasn’t stopped touching Patrick. He feels more than bad about this. Faeries aren’t supposed to have a conscience, but nonetheless, Pete feels—Pete feels a little sick.

Patrick moves out of Pete’s hotel room and into Joe and Andy’s. “You can stay,” Pete says desperately, pathetically.

Patrick gives him such a look. “Your girlfriend flew across the ocean to be with you,” Patrick says dryly. “I can think of nowhere I’d rather _not_ be than this hotel room tonight.”

Berry and branch, Pete is sorry. Pete wants to go with him. Why can’t all four of them cram into two beds like it’s four years ago, like no one knows their songs or faces or names, like they still live together in a smashed-up place in Roscoe Park with a defunct bar, a root beer keg, poor privacy, and worse boundaries?

Here is what Pete knows about himself: Pete can give his whole heart to someone and still have his whole heart left to give to Patrick, or to swear to Queen Eloissine, or to keep for himself. Pete believes the same is true about his body, whosever skin this even is.

What Pete doesn’t know is how to explain that to everyone else. Ashlee is someone he is in love with. Patrick is someone who is part of him—someone he _is._ It is impossible to explain this distinction without hurting someone’s feelings. It isn’t that he loves Ash _less_ , it’s that when he isn’t with Patrick, he isn’t even his whole _self_. Patrick is the thing that makes it possible _for_ him to love. It’s the cheesiest line anyone’s ever heard, but Patrick _completes_ him. Patrick is—is the prerequisite for Pete saying _I_.

Pete is not Pete without Patrick.

How is even the truest love supposed to compete with that? Not that he would call what he has with Ashlee _the truest love_. He tries not to refer to it at all, mostly. He doesn’t know what to call it. She’s beautiful, exciting, talented, hilarious, exactly his type. She ought to be perfect for him.

She’s not Patrick.

Another point of contention is this: touring is supposed to be his Patrick time. Touring is supposed to belong to them. He’s not feeling very gracious about sharing it.

Worse is that, thanks to the raven, Pete knows the fae are watching. That means the stakes are high, even if he’s not sure exactly what they are. Is he endangering Ashlee when he takes her hand, or when he doesn’t? Is it his attention or his disinterest that risks someone else’s life? Pete misses the sound and the feeling of the axe creaking above his _own_ neck. That was straightforward. That he understood.

Pete holds Ashlee’s hand and avoids Patrick’s eye. He is surrounded by everyone he loves. He feels terrible. He feels alone. He only wants what he can’t have.

 _Not that he’s looking,_ but Patrick won’t look at him, either.

Pete catches a Welsh goblin tailing them through the crowds at an outdoor market in Reading. Ashlee is a few yards ahead, dipping her nose into bouquets at a flower stall. Pete is watching closely, planning to buy her whichever bundles make her smile, when he glimpses a small, hunched man with a craggy nose and a wispy beard, wrapped in a stained blue parka.

At first, Pete just thinks the small, grubby figure bobbing through the crowd is a pickpocket. As the figure veers with apparent determination towards Ash, though, his autonomic nervous system tingles to life. He’s a trained warrior, after all. He has nightmares about combat. He’s wired to fight, too stupid to flee. The figure is moving towards Ashlee, picking up speed, and Pete is about to call out, to warn her or scare the would-be mugger, when he notices its feet.

Instead of pants and shoes, beneath the parka there are knobbled green-brown legs, lumpy with skin the color of leaf rot. The cartoonishly large feet are three-toed, like something that would come with a bargain bin monster costume. Pete’s instincts stop prickling and take over.

Pete dives through the crowd, shoving people aside like they are so many scraps of paper, weightless nothings like all the words he ever writes. He closes the last stretch of distance in a leap, landing bodily on top of the creature just as it plunges its scabby green hand into its parka and goes to pull something out.

Pete, knowing on a level below thought that it’s a weapon, lands on the creature knees first, fists second. Three fast, merciless blows to the face and then he grabs the creature by the neck of its parka and brings its broken, bleeding teeth up close to his face. Pete stares down at it with all the menace and fury of a black Unseelie knight, fully blooded and without a heart, and snarls, “Who sent you, fiend? I have the word of a Queen of Faerie that this woman will come to no harm.”

With shredded lips, the creature grins. Pete can see its bloody teeth through the slits he’s punched into its face. “One only wishes to pay one’s regards to your lovely wife,” it says sweetly. Smiling with a mouth full of blood: that’s Unseelie. Pete would bet his life upon it.

“She’s not my wife.” It’s the only thing Pete can think to say. His mind is full of red, a perfect mirror for the bloodslick down the goblin’s chin. Thoughts churn in the tide, but they are not of words.

“Oh, that’s _odd_ ,” says the goblin, smiling wider. It is making Pete’s skin crawl, and not from the gore. “One wonders wherever one got such an impression. The object of one’s true affection is usually so _easy_ to detect. Love is so _obvious_. Doesn’t one think?”

The anger, the rage, the blood rising in him—it doesn’t stop, exactly. But it goes cold. It rushes just as forceful in his ears, swims before his eyes, squeezes his chest and bones and veins just the same, only now instead of fire it is desperate, burning ice. In that moment there is no one Pete would not kill to protect the people he loves. The _two_ people he loves. It is terribly apparent that Pete and the goblin both know this.

The goblin uncurls the clenched hand he pulled from his parka in the time it took Pete to cross the square and tackle him. His mildewed leather palm is full of old, yellowed teeth. Some of them are burrowed with pinprick brown tunnels of rot. Some are broken or cracked, to match the goblin’s new mouthful. Some are baby teeth. Some are large, the enamel worn with a lifetime of chewing, plaque tidemarks showing when gums used to be.

“For your wife,” says the goblin. “A token of one’s lowly admiration.”

Before Pete’s eyes, the goblin’s face shifts, elongating and bleaching to a dusty brown. The features become more human, the legs lengthening, the feet shrinking, the mottled green skin disappearing beneath dirty khaki slacks, white socks, men’s Velcro sandals.

The voice changes too. “Take it, please just take it!” It is the voice of a warbling, terrified old man—a voice to match the man whose parka Pete is holding onto, the obviously frail, elderly, possibly homeless man Pete has one knee on the chest of. The goblin-turned-man flings the handful of teeth at Pete, only now it’s a handful of change, of human coins instead of human teeth. “It’s all I have!”

Pete becomes aware all at once of the crowd, gathered to stare and murmur. The murmurs are whipping faster, picking up volume. Pete Wentz kneeling fist-first over a pleading, bleeding beggar. Oh, the tabloids will be delighted. Eloissine, for Pete is sure she will hear of this, if she didn’t orchestrate it herself, will be _delighted._

Ash is there at his elbow as Pete numbly shifts his weight and lets the goblin slide out from underneath him. There will be no questioning the creature now. There will be no answers. “ _Pete_! What happened? What are you doing?”

She sounds so horrified. Something in Pete’s chest blackens, wilts, turns to dust. Hyacinth and evergreen, what will Patrick think?

Pete is so fucking weary of never being able to explain himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hoo boy. Hoooooooo boy. This chapter comes to you from NYC, where I am at a conference but have not forgotten you! New York is fun and delicious and this chapter is full of suffering. I learned some things about Japanese mythology and now you will too! I'm sorry that all I do is hurt you. Never trust me; I mean well but I'm made of misery. <3
> 
> Next: just, fuck.
> 
> Also! Keep your eyeballs peeled on Monday for a Spooky Halloween Surprise! Remember: gay love is a vampire.


	12. My Childhood Spat Back The Monster That You See

“I thought he was going to hurt Ashlee,” Pete says through gritted teeth for what feels like the hundredth time. Can’t lie, can’t lie. His body physically aches with the inability to tell his friends what he really is.

“Your loyalty is striking,” Patrick says dryly. Andy and Joe both turn to frown at him. Sometimes it’s like they’re synchronized: Patrick’s clockwork emotional bodyguards. No one looks to Pete with reproach or concern. They just let him sit there, hurting. Ash is out doing the popstar-across-the-pond thing. She didn’t much want to be around him right now, either.

“It’s just, can we like… _not_ add beating up old men and trashing hotel rooms to our notoriety rap sheet? There’s already… enough.” Andy stares at his hands while he says this, shifting in his seat. He’s not very comfortable in interpersonal confrontations. It hangs unspoken between them that, if the band is notorious or decried or hated for anything, it’s Pete. It’s always Pete.

Pete makes such a piss-poor human.

“There is more going on than you understand!” Pete bites out the words, his frustration getting the better of him. He deserves it. The way they’re all looking at him, the way they’re thinking he’s wild, dishonorable, dirty—he _deserves_ it. But it kills him, that they might think it over this, over a time when his swift violence was judicious, was intended to protect. It kills him that they should hate him for the wrong reasons and never notice the right ones.

“So explain it to us,” Joe says. He sounds soft, reasonable. His face is open and smooth and he’s staring at Pete like he really _cares_ about him. This is too much. Pete has—god, how many times in his life has someone even _looked_ at Pete like that? Pete grew up knowing, has always known, that he is a tool. A means to an end. A person you endure for the gifts that he brings. His lyrics and his name are worth something to this band, and so they’ve all learned to tolerate him. It is too painful to imagine he is liked. It is too painful to be cared for.

People who are care about you are so much easier to damage.

Pete’s face closes down. He can’t explain. Not without telling them—a thousand things they wouldn’t believe, that the fae would kill them for knowing. Easier to let them loathe him. This is an outcome he’s learning to be… comfortable with.

So he doesn’t say anything. They play a tense, strained show. It is worse than the time Joe split Pete’s face open with his guitar, when Pete played the show half-blind with blood in his eyes and a wild grin on his face, feeling half in battle, seeing the world through a delirious, delicious haze of red. Pete is aware that everyone deserves better.

Patrick finds him backstage, before the encore. Sweaty, stage-sodden Patrick striding up to him in the dark: the sight plugs in Pete’s nervous system like a string of Christmas lights. Patrick moves into Pete’s personal space, stops with less than an inch between their bodies, and places his hand on Pete’s chest. It is an odd touch, stalled somewhere between confrontation and comfort. Patrick’s hand spreads warm over the space where Pete’s heart should be.

“You said there was more going on than we understood,” Patrick says. His voice is low, hurried. There isn’t much time. This is why making out before encore is so good. You’re riding on the waves of godhood, kissing desperate to outrun the crash. Pete hopes against hope that’s what they’re here to do, today. Pete is aware that this makes him a terrible person. Pete is oh—so— _aware_.

“I want to understand,” Patrick says. Pete is as moved by the urgency as he is powerless to satisfy it.

“You can’t,” Pete says. “You won’t.”

“That’s only true if you don’t tell me.”

It is such a simple request. Poppy and poinsettia, Pete wants things to be simple.

“Patrick, do you remember when I asked you if you were a faerie?” Pete’s voice comes out a bare breath. He doesn’t know if Patrick can even hear it above the chanting of the crowd.

He is a foolish, foolish boy, with recklessness in his chest masquerading as a heartbeat. He will deserve the sorrow he summons, surely he will. But for this moment—for just this moment…

Patrick does not answer him, not with words. Patrick smashes their faces together, his teeth finding Pete’s mouth before his lips, the kiss brutal and rushed, holding nothing back, not concerned with gentleness. For a kiss, it is not terribly unlike a punch. Pete kisses back, desperately: oxygen, oxygen, after a week in the empty void of space.

“You have to talk to me,” Patrick pants, angry, into the space between their mouths. The kiss has ended as it began, without warning: Pete’s lips and tongue still look for Patrick’s, his forehead grinding against Patrick’s. He isn’t _done_. “I can’t help, I can’t understand, if you don’t start talking to me.”

“I can’t talk to you,” Pete whispers, “about this.”

This time he knows Patrick hears him, because he breaks away all at once, leaving Pete’s body cold where once they touched. “Encore,” is all he says, voice gruff and—yes—disappointed. It’s hard to tell if he’s describing Pete’s behavior or announcing the time. Patrick walks away. Helpless, all Pete can do is follow.

*

They fly back to the States.

Pete goes ahead and knocks himself out for the flight. He knows from the last two extended trips in a tube of poison that it’s going to be violent for him, and he figures—he figures it’s easier to court overdose on anxiolytics than to watch Patrick realize he won’t be the one to sit on the tiny airplane sink and rub Pete’s back, not with Ash here.

Pete wishes he could explain this feeling, this predicament. He cannot. He takes pills instead. They take the buzz out of his head entirely, rendering the world in cotton and calm. He knows it’s a knife’s edge he walks, this taking-too-many but-not-enough. But what was it that Nassara told him, the time he didn’t die? That the prescription poison keeps things out. It dulls the magic. (Pete doesn’t want to think about what else it might be dulling.)

Carefully, like an accountant, he balances the toxicity in his blood to block the effect of other poisons. This time, he doesn’t spend the flight wracked with pain and vomiting mud. He spends it in twilight, coming in and out of sleep, stretched across three seats. Once when he wakes up, his head is on Joe’s knee. The next time he wakes up, it’s on Ashlee’s. The times after that, he wakes up alone.

Maybe it’s not ideal. But mostly what Pete notices is: it works.

*

“Patrick, what would it take? What kind of miracle do you think it would take, for us to be together?”

Patrick is leaning into Pete, using Pete as a pillow while they watch _Labyrinth_ for the hundredth time. They go back overseas to continue touring in three weeks, but there was no way Pete could wait that long to lay on a couch with Patrick.

Pete is stroking Patrick’s hair, gently and with appropriate awe petting him. Pete’s tongue is reckless because Pete is a little high, or low, or nothing. Pete’s been using his anxiety prescription like painkillers lately, since it worked so well on the plane. _Pills dull the magic_. They keep the worst part of him quieter, further away. They cocoon him in a layer of toxic bubble wrap Eloissine can’t pop. If he can strike just the right level of poison in _his_ blood, he doesn’t have to come home at sunrise wearing someone else’s.

It makes it easier, too, to be whatever person Pete Wentz is supposed to be. Much photographed, much loathed, scapegoat and commodity. Stripped down under press floodlights and flagellated for the world’s delight or armored up under the hill and sent to whip a Seelie prince for the Queen’s amusement—these aren’t different, really. Even if they can’t protect you from doing the things, pills have a way of protecting you from feeling them.

“Together how?” Patrick asks carefully. He has gone still against Pete’s chest: spooked prey. He doesn’t realize Pete’s only wearing the suit of a predator. Pete, in his heart, would choose to be harmless—if changelings had hearts. If changelings had choices.

Pete knows Patrick knows exactly what he’s asking. The question is a caution: Pete will ruin this moment if he speaks. If they name it, they can’t have it. These have been the rules for a long time. When they follow these rules, their friendship survives.

But pills make Pete clumsy. Poisoned Pete does the wrong things for the worst reasons. Pete shifts on the couch, bends over Patrick, kisses him on the mouth.

For half a breathless instant, Patrick kisses back. Just as quick, and a lot more certain, Patrick pushes him away. Pulls back.

“First and fucking foremost,” Patrick whispers, pulling his knees into his chest and balling up protectively on the next couch cushion, reminding Pete viscerally of the car crash, the kiss that ended with Pete’s blood on Patrick’s dear face, “it would take your girlfriend _not being in the next room_.”

Patrick’s face is sorrow and fury and frustration in one. Not so much as a _hair_ is touching Pete. “You can’t just say the words and get whatever you want. It’s not fucking _magic_. You have to do it too. you have to—you have to grow up, because you’re not Peter fucking Pan, and live the life you say you want. You can’t just talk about it.”

_That_ would be a real miracle.

Patrick waits as if daring Pete to find the audacity to respond. When he doesn’t, Patrick concludes, “You have to ask me what I want too.”

“I’m a mistake making myself over and over again,” Pete says, a bit dreamily. He may have erred on the side of too much poison today. He’s still a novice. Mistakes are to be expected.

“What does that mean? Don’t talk to me like I’m a song,” Patrick warns him. Fairly, Pete thinks. This is a fair request.

“If I could put what’s in my head into my mouth instead, I know you’d know me.”

Patrick’s frowning, but he leans his shoulder onto Pete’s leg just a little, just enough to offer a forgiving weight. “I do know you,” he says. But he doesn’t sound entirely convinced, and he doesn’t seem to expect anything more. He turns back to Bowie, frown still spoiling his face.

Pete doesn’t ask again. That is the nature of the task: he has to find his own miracle. He can’t have someone else’s.

*

In Australia, they are closer to the sun.

The equinox happens without him and he feels the battle knifing bloody through his body nonetheless, though it does not leave a mark. The senseless squandering of life is the true mint of power, of immortality. Under the hill, his friends are dying for the thrill of it, squabbling at swordpoint over who gets to sit in which chair when.

It is hard to care about any of this when Pete is above the ground and under the sun. When Pete is under Patrick.

If Pete was worried that he broke something, when he brought Ashlee to England, he was right. He broke their restraint. He broke their resolve. He shattered any pretense that they were doing anything but each other. They aren’t holding back anymore. They are fireworks, going off too soon.

They hold hands and stroke inseams under tables, kiss around corners and behind amps, make fists of each other’s collars and force their hands down each other’s waistbands any time there’s a _pretty_ good chance they won’t be seen. (The criteria for what constitutes such a chance is slipping.) Pete sucks Patrick’s dick so often his cheeks start to feel permanently hollowed-out and aching. They fuck in the morning, in public bathrooms, every night in every hotel. They’re slammed together like magnets. There is no moment they could possibly be touching that they are not. It’s not close enough. Pete wants to stretch out in the blazing heat of the sun until they melt together, mixing silky like chocolate, slipping their skins.

Sure, maybe passion like this is just like any other kind of fire: either it burns out or you burn up. But desperation is the point. They know they’re wicked, they know they’re cheating, they know they can’t really have it. They know it can’t really last. That’s why they’re licking up every last drop, stuffing their greedy hearts full to bursting, while they can. No one has to say it for each of them to know: it’s not for long. They’re not for long.

Pete has never felt so happy, empty, doomed, alive as he does on this tour, on and under and around this Patrick. _Work a miracle, work a miracle_ : he’s tried. He’s trying. He can’t.

Pete gets the fever to put his feet on every continent, to play a show on every significant landmass in the world. He feels good about this idea, like maybe it will be his miracle. Maybe he can keep them on the road forever. Maybe Patrick can be his to keep, so long as they never try to go home. But the weather changes when they are playing in South America; they miss their window. They can’t make Antarctica after all. No records will be set or broken. No miracles, not on this tour.

“ _He_ is a miracle,” Pete says into the sink every night, filling the bowl with water to carry his words back home. “This is my miracle. _We are the miracle_.” There’s never any answer. Either they aren’t getting his message, or this kind of miracle—getting laid in a bed gilt with lies—doesn’t count.

*

Not long before they’re due to starting recording, Ashlee comes into the bedroom one night pale-faced, looking shaken. She sits on the edge of the bed. Pete is sprawled across it, scratching in a notebook words he thinks might become songs under Patrick’s clever touch.

The words she says send shockwaves through the rest of Pete’s life. Ever-expanding rings of un-undoable difference. The path you walk can shift so easily, so smoothly, you don’t even feel when it jumps the track.

“I think I’m pregnant,” she says. “Or—yes. I mean, I’m sure.”

Pete holds her as she cries. Maybe he’s not human enough, but he doesn’t know why she sounds so sad, so scared. Like everything else about him, his excitement is not an act. Where he comes from, there is nothing more treasured, wanted, or prized than a human child. Pete is wonderstruck, totally amazed. A child, _his child_ , a tiny shining star made up of him and her. It had never even occurred to him such a thing was possible.

“Maybe it makes sense to be scared,” Pete says, smoothing her hair, feeling love well up and overflow inside of him, “but nothing good that’s ever happened to _me_ has been planned.”

“I just don’t know,” she says to his damp shoulder, where she has hidden her face and her tears. Understand that they are not tears of _not wanting_ ; they are tears of _overcome_ , tears of _unprepared for this_ , tears of _not knowing what to do_. “We don’t—we don’t have the best track record, Pete.”

Pete feels like it’s a new sunrise, a second chance. Pete feels like this is his chance to finally, finally make something _good_. “No one will love this kid more than me,” he swears fiercely. “We’ll make a new record. I’ll get better, I’ll learn to be good. We will make this work. We’ll knock it out of the fucking park, Ash.”

“I don’t know,” she says again.

Pete lifts her tear-streaked chin with his finger. He kisses between her eyebrows, the tip of her nose, the point of her chin. He looks into her eyes and promises, “Let me show you. Even if it takes a miracle, this will work.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am _SORRY_ okay
> 
> Check out [my Halloween fic here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8368621) to feel happiness and enjoy [these curated Peterick jams](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnAelXIH5xPLqMoKzkxFphLEFueR50Sb2) (many contributed by you, lovely readers!) to feel angst and delight. The playlist was designed to write to and also accompany a Peterick powerpoint primer that I'm happy to share with anyone who would like to laugh for a minute instead of just SUFFERING. 
> 
> Please accept my offerings because next week: MORE PAIN... and I don't just mean the election XX


	13. I'll Take Your Heart Served Up Two Ways

Step one of being good, being reliable, being a dad who knows how to want and love whatever type of child he’s given, human or otherwise—step one of making it work—is this:

You have to stop sleeping with other people.

It’s a chance. It feels like—like a chance. To be part of a family for the first time. To make a place where he belongs. The best part if, he wouldn’t be hurting anyone. For once in his life. If Pete can just be good, no one has to be in danger. No one has to be broken-hearted. (Except, of course, for Pete.)

This is what Pete tells himself about Patrick: Pete risks ruining Patrick every time they touch. He risks Patrick’s life every time they lie down. Every kiss could kill him. How selfish can Pete be? All these nights Patrick’s spending in Pete’s bunk, in Pete’s body, these are nights Patrick isn’t spending with someone else. Someone who might really love him, the way he deserves to be loved. Someone he might really love in return. Someone who can be more than a—a _favorite mistake_.

This is what Pete tells himself about Patrick: Patrick doesn’t love him. This is a good thing. This is the thing that will save Patrick’s life.

Step two: you have to tell Patrick you aren’t sleeping with other people anymore.

Pete is not looking forward to step two.

*

Patrick’s temper is famous. Pete thinks maybe things will go more smoothly if this is a conversation they have in public. He flies to Chicago, which he was going to have to do pretty soon anyway, with some excuse about talent scouting for Decaydance, so he can look at Patrick’s face while he says the words.

Pete’s been living in California, to the extent that he lives in any one place; he’s still in Chicago often enough to keep his skin from rotting off, to keep his glamour charged, his body healthy. He tries to avoid ever being caught unmedicated in the state of Illinois. He tries to keep the magic off him. Maybe he’ll never work a miracle, but it’s been almost a year since he’s murdered anything on Eloissine’s command. Pete’s become a revisionist. He’s got smaller dreams, dreams the size of an infant. Maybe _happily ever after_ isn’t necessary. Maybe, if he can keep Faerie at bay with meds and miles, he can settle into a comfortable _close enough_.

“I should be sick of you, after all that touring. But put three weeks between us and I feel hollowed out with missing you. You’re my phantom limb,” Patrick greets him. Pete stands up from the rickety little table where he’s been stirring sugar into his coffee—his gut is so wracked with dread, riddled with pills that he hasn’t gotten down more than a single sip—and Patrick wraps him in a desperate, crushing hug that is not entirely platonic. Patrick holds him like they might be able to seep into each other’s skin, like he wants to memorize on a cellular level Pete’s musculature, the shape of his skeleton, the smell of his clothes and hair and skin.

Pete hugs him back in just the same way. How is he going to say the words? Stars, kings, and fucking nephilim. Changelings don’t have hearts, not really. So how can Pete’s be breaking?

Pete doesn’t know how to say goodbye to Patrick even once, let alone in a way that will stretch out from this point in time all through their futures, like a wall of static and cold between them. Somehow, this is what he has come here to do. It is a spell he has no idea how to cast.

Pete has never been just one thing. He has never been good. He has never belonged. He has never built anything—only torn things apart.

If he and Ash can do this. If they can be a family. If they can make a _home_. Pete has to believe that’s worth it. That’s worth anything. Pete’s never had a chance like this before. It isn’t something he can have from Patrick, isn’t something Patrick’s ever wanted from Pete.

He has to try. All he knows is that he just—has to try.

Pete wants to badly to be wrong about himself.

So here’s step two: explaining this to Patrick.

They let each other go. Patrick sits down across the table. He keeps biting his lips and grinning sideways at Pete, like he just can’t contain it. Pete feels like time will run down and they’ll both die before he finds a way to say the words.

Patrick puts his hand over Pete’s to stop him pouring yet another sugar into his cup. A small mountain of spent sugar packets sits beside his coffee, which by now is probably gritty with sweet. “I will never understand why you even order black coffee,” Patrick says, his voice the special mix of fondness and exasperation he only uses for Pete. “You obviously don’t like the taste.”

“If you’d ever meet me somewhere that served frappucinos we wouldn’t have to have this conversation,” Pete complains good-naturedly. He’s got the sweet tooth of a Seelie, the impulse control of a 29 year-old changeling, the caffeine habit of an adolescent American male. Pete can drink a _lot_ of frappucinos.

“My taste in pretentious bookstores is for your own good,” Patrick informs him. Their waitress comes by and Patrick orders a half-pot of Turkish coffee. Pete valiantly refrains from commenting on Patrick’s own caffeine habit.

Pete knows from experience that Patrick can nurse a half-pot for an hour or more. Part of him flushes with pleasure at the idea that Patrick wants to linger in this café with him; the rest of him cringes with fear that Patrick will not want to stay and finish his drink after he hears what Pete has to say.

Pete is having a lot of complex feelings already and all that’s happened so far is Patrick placing a drink order. This does not bode well for the conversation overall.

“I have news,” Pete blurts out. He cannot stand this. Patrick waits, bright and expectant, oblivious to the clawing black dread contorting Pete’s guts. Pete wishes he could see even five seconds into the future, get a preview of how Patrick will react. Maybe if he’d spent less of the last seven years on the run from his heritage, he’d have managed to pick up at least one divination spell.

Instead, he comes by future knowledge the human way: pushing forward brazenly through time.

“You’re the first person I’m telling. It’s—no, don’t make that face, it’s good news!” Pete laughs because, in spite of everything, he means it. He’s feeling a lot of things, and happiness—happiness is a lot of them. No matter what comes of it, it’s the best news Pete’s had in a long time. Since he moved a mountain, maybe; since he woke up in a hospital still alive; since the night in Gem City Patrick wanted him too.

“I’m going to be a dad,” Pete says. “Ashlee’s two months pregnant.”

Maybe it’s the fae in him, but Pete is truly surprised when Patrick’s face folds in. He hasn’t even said the hard thing yet. He sees a brief flash of pain in those beautiful eyes, and then nothing. Shutters slam shut, storm windows go up. Patrick’s face is perfectly mild, perfectly neutral, perfectly smooth. A beat after that, he shapes his mouth into what you’d imagine a smile looked like if you’d only read about them in books.

“Congratulations,” Patrick says with real warmth, though Pete can see the extra moisture in his eyes. He’s never been more sure that Patrick’s human. Pete always so helplessly can only say what he means, can only feel what he feels. Patrick kicks up a cloud of dust and obscures himself. “What incredible news. I’m so happy for you!”

Pete can hardly believe it. It’s pressed like headlines all over Patrick’s composed face. Patrick is _lying_. Patrick doesn’t mean it. He isn’t happy for Pete at all.

Pete thinks back, running through their relationship in his head. He cannot think of one single time Patrick asked for it to be anything different, anything more than it is. Actually—he can think of several times Patrick asked for it to be _less_ than it is. For Pete to be _less_ how he is. Pete cannot remember Patrick asking him, even once, to belong to Patrick alone. To come home with Patrick, to live and sleep beside him, to have each other wholly and full-time.

He cannot recall any indication that Patrick has ever wanted that. And Pete—Pete has been _watching_. For years, Pete has been watching.

Pete has never seen even one sign it meant more than what it was to anyone but Pete.

“To whatever extent I was ever yours,” Pete says to the sucrose-swirled surface of his coffee, “I can’t be anymore.”

It is easier to speak, under the weight of his tangled-up hurt, confusion, anger, and optimism. It is easier to believe Patrick will be better off without him when neither of them can meet the other’s eyes.

With a mouthful of scorn, Patrick says, “You’re Pete Wentz, right?” Patrick’s own coffee arrives and both are silent long after the barista has moved away. Pete waits to find out what the hell Patrick meant by that. “You’ll kiss anybody. It doesn’t have to mean anything, just feel good for a little while. Until you get distracted by the next thing.”

Pete’s mouth opens of its own accord. Pete is passing familiar with pain, and those words _hurt_. Patrick is describing a faerie so perfectly that Pete wonders if it’s true—if he’s been wrong about himself all this time and this thing, this feeling of being solved like a puzzle by Patrick, is just an ad hoc justification for doing whatever the hell he feels like at any given moment. Patrick is saying it, Andy and Joe have said it, half the tabloids and gossip columnists in the country have said it. Doesn’t that make it a kind of reality?

Pete can’t even say _I don’t think that’s true_ because it _has_ been true, so many times before. He says instead, “Maybe you’re right about me.” You’re supposed to fight, supposed to argue. Pete can’t find it in him. Pete’s trapped in a web of his own inability to lie.

He says instead, “That’s why I’m trying to be better.”

Patrick pushes himself off the table, standing, and glowers down at Pete. “I’m glad you finally found someone worth the effort.” His voice is a snarl, tight with the anger he’s learned to conceal but not eliminate over the years. It’s the voice he always uses right before he breaks or throws something, before he backs Pete into a wall shouting about a pop hook like Pete’s opinion is a strangling offense. Those arguments, those studio battles—they always seemed like a way to sublimate the impossible tension between them, an excuse to erode the barriers in between. Now the anger just seems like anger.

“It’s supposed to be good news,” Pete says to himself, to his undrinkable coffee, to Patrick’s back. “I’m going to have a family.”

It is important, Pete thinks, that the record show he is not giving up.

*

Steps three through infinity are: keep your hands off Patrick, over and over and over again.

Every time you want to touch him, do not. Every time you want to say “Stopping is the worst idea I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a few. Let’s belong to each other,” _do not_. Every time you think you’re going to cry or scream or die of it, of the ridiculous agony of not calling Patrick, not just fucking turning up on his doorstep, do the opposite of that. Stay home. Speak to no one. Bite your fist or something just metal enough to burn your tongue and don’t let a sound out of your mouth.

Pete feels like a fucking junkie.

He’s shaking awake, tremoring in his sleep. He’s waking drenched in sweat from nightmares about Patrick’s body, hacked apart. He’s nauseous and dizzy. His razor shakes so much in his hand that he can’t shave his face without cutting it.

He’d think it was magic sickness, except he’s still in Chicago, visiting friends and family, working on some of his businesses, scouting bands. He’s practically next door to Eloissine’s hill, even if he’s pilled to the gills to numb the prickling feeling out. It’s not from magic or distance, oaths or enchantments.

It’s from quitting Patrick.

What this is, is detox. What this is, is withdrawal.

Quitting cold turkey works for exactly eight days.

Eight days. Pete’s scheduled to fly back to Beverly Hills in the morning, where he’s moving into Ashlee’s enormous house and settling into a good, honest life. A father, a partner, a man who says he’s only going to sleep with one person and then _actually does it_. A husband, maybe, if he does this first part well enough. All he has to do is get through one more night in the same city as Patrick’s heartbeat. _One more night._

10:13pm finds Pete leaning on Patrick’s buzzer. He’s a little drunk, but not enough to make this okay. To make it excusable. He drank just enough to get brave, and he did it on purpose, because he wanted to end up here, at Patrick’s door.

Patrick’s voice is crabby when it comes through the intercom. Probably because Pete’s been leaning on it for longer than is considered polite at an hour when unannounced visitors are not traditionally expected.

“I ordered my takeout three fucking hours ago, I don’t want it anymore,” Patrick says. “Do not even ask me for a tip, I swear to god.”

“What kind of takeout?” Pete is distractible under the soberest conditions, and this is… not that. Takeout sounds delicious.

“Indian. Pete? What are you doing here?”

“Eating Indian food, if we get lucky. Getting lucky if we don’t.”

This may have been a miscalculation, Pete thinks. Silence stretches. It’s chilly on the doorstep. Fucking Chicago. It’s always cold in fucking Chicago. He wonders if Patrick is going to leave him down here to intercept the errant delivery person and/or freeze to death.

Pete buzzes again, just for a second. “Trick? I’m sorry. I don’t want to fly out with things like this between us. Planes crash sometimes, you know. Shit, I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. I just… I miss you so much. I already miss you _so fucking much_. It’s unclear to me how I can possibly survive this. Survive a _lifetime_ , without… without.”

“Just to be clear,” Patrick’s voice crackles through the intercom at last, “I am buzzing you in for sex and sex only. I’m not going to listen to any of this shit about your feelings.”

Patrick buzzes the door, and Pete takes the stairs two at a time all the way up.

The Indian food never comes, but they don’t mind. They devour each other.

*

In the morning, Pete slips out while Patrick is still sleeping because he is a coward. He leaves a note for the same reason.

_I meant it about stopping. I’m sorry I’m so sorry. This is the last time. xo pete_

It’s not a lie if you mean it when you write it, even if it doesn’t turn out to be true.

_  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, lovelies! I hope you're all safe. I haven't really been okay since the election, but I think I am finally hurt enough to be fearless. I have found my bravery. Wise words of encouragement from a friend: "In times like these, existence is resistance. Loving yourself and your friends in a world that wants to kill you is a radical act."
> 
> I wish I had some happier Peterick to give you as a balm! I do not. I'm planning to write some Christmas fluff for December, though. And hopefully I will also stop hurting you with this story by then. NO PROMISES


	14. This Crystal Ball Is Always Cloudy Except For When You Look Into The Past

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I FORGOT TO POST THIS YESTERDAY BECAUSE I WAS PLAYING POKEMON SUN ALL DAY
> 
> SORRY GUYS
> 
> I HOPE YOU LIKE IT!

_Folie a Deux_ sends them back in time.

Even from the outset, writing this album is ugly. They’re fighting a war of attrition over every note, every syllable, every song. Pete lets himself get pulled into one argument after another. Sometimes, if he’s being honest, he courts disagreement. When Patrick is being reasonable, Pete pushes. He makes suggestions that he knows will piss Patrick off. He is more stubborn about lyrics than he’s ever been. If they can’t be friends, Pete thinks, they might as well be bitter enemies.

That he gets an erection every time Patrick gets in his face and starts screaming at him has _nothing_ to do with it. He’s being good, he’s making it work: he’s not touching anyone.

Well, he’s touching himself. He’s taking thirty bathroom breaks a day to rub his own chafed dick, like maybe with enough friction he can burn Patrick out of it. Everyone is fighting, Joe getting dragged into bitter squabbles with a rope of his own notes and chords, Andy losing his usually irenic temper over how peevish and aggressive they’re being with each other. Pete hates himself with spectacular, astonishing force. His whole body burns with wanting. He doesn’t remember it being this hard before— _he_ doesn’t remember being so hard before. Somehow, he lived five years without touching Patrick. Somehow he sustained himself on a handful of stolen kisses and not-quite-casual touches for half a decade. Now he can’t even make it five minutes without his brain churning, trying to turn up the right sequence of insults, words, and musical suggestions that will entice Patrick’s hands around his throat.

The whole time, the whole time he’s being so resolute, so brand-new-Pete, exercising just this one tiny shred of restraint— _I’ll push til he screams at me, I’ll gratify myself to the way his voice sounds on the vocal tracking for w.a.m.s, I’ll go to sleep each night with my fingernails digging into my thighs imagining they’re his, and this will have to count as_ being good _because it’s the best I can fucking do_ —the whole time Pete knows it’s futile. He can feel Patrick in his _bones_. Collision is inevitable.

He’s supposed to love Ashlee but he’s _supposed to_ love Patrick, one like a contract and one like fate.

Their atoms are smashing together in lieu of their bodies. Pete’s longing is molecular, his need subatomic. It’s not a question of stopping; it’s a question of how long Pete can hang on.

He already knows the answer is not _forever_.

The answer might not even be _until the end of the day._

*

“I thought last time was the last time,” Patrick pants while Pete moves inside him. This line, eight syllables of scorn, is one Patrick has thrown out each time. This is the fourth, by Pete’s count: once in the studio, just after Patrick had choked Pete up against a wall with his forearm over a major-to-minor chord progression; once in the bathroom, when Patrick came by with his guitar for honest songwriting just as Pete was stepping out of the shower and things got out of hand from there; once by the pool in the middle of the night, where Pete goes sometimes to think and write and _not_ to suck Patrick’s dick and Patrick goes sometimes when he’s hoping to find Pete and/or a blowjob; and this time, knees scraped on corporate housing carpet, just inside the doorway of Patrick’s room, a threshold they barely managed to cross before they were on each other, hands and teeth tearing at clothes, mouths and moans and _needing_.

“This is the last time,” Pete gasps, coming. “We—have to stop. God, Trick—!”

“You’re a liar,” Patrick says, arching his back, thrusting into Pete’s hand. “Don’t you _dare_ stop.”

*

This morning Pete and Patrick are being interviewed by BBC in support of _Folie_. Or at least, that was the impression Pete had based on all the scheduling and confirmations and label-orchestrated agreements. But so far, Pete’s alone with the interviewer, running out of charming ways to kill time. There is animosity in the room. Pete does not feel well-liked.

He is equal parts relieved and confused when Joe bustles in. “Sorry I’m running late,” he says, flashing his easy, relaxed grin to the effect of instantly de-hackling the interviewer. Pete, who swallowed an entire handful of pills before entering this room with the express purpose of softening his edges and becoming more… relatable, is amazed at how effortlessly Joe does it.

Pete has never yet found anything that’s easy.

“What a surprise! I was expecting Patrick,” says the interviewer. “The reclusive Joe Trohman is quite a treat.”

A frown crosses Joe’s face, and he passes it to Pete. “I’m not reclusive,” Joe says, sideways, to Pete. “No one ever asks for me.”

The interview skips by smoothly. Pete doesn’t have to say much. Joe carries them. The interviewer asks several unwelcome, pointed questions about Pete’s relationship with Patrick. Pete makes a snap decision and insinuates himself into Joe’s personal space. He tangles a hand in Joe’s hair, leans his head on Joe’s shoulder, rests his hand on Joe’s thigh. Joe tenses beside him but doesn’t protest, doesn’t scoot away. Pete feels both relief and sorrow that Joe seems to understand exactly what he’s doing, why he’s doing it.

He’s playing the Pete Wentz card. He’s making it meaningless. He’s rendering obsolete and empty every touch he’s bestowed upon Patrick’s skin.

It is terrible. It is wrenching. It is necessary.

After, when the interviewer and the cameraman are fussing over a laptop, Joe turns to Pete and says, “What are you going to do? About Patrick?”

Pete feels that he does not have enough information to answer this question. “Is there something going on with Patrick?” he asks cautiously.

Of course, Joe knows they’ve been fighting. Joe knows they’ve been fucking. Pete would do insane, impossible things to avoid answering the question Joe isn’t quite speaking. Pete has done. He moved a mountain, didn’t he?

“Surely you’ve realized he didn’t show for this interview,” Joe says slowly, as if Pete is very stupid. Pete feels very stupid. “About fifteen minutes after he was supposed to be here, he texted me that he wasn’t ‘up to pretending everything’s okay.’ He didn’t want to sit next to you on camera, Pete. So you tell me if something’s going on with Patrick.”

Pete’s guts are arranging themselves into Gordian knots. This is not comfortable. Pete’s eyes are on the interviewer, who does not appear to be listening to him and Joe, but you can really never be too sure with the press. Pete himself has always had a particular knack for overhearing things best left unheard.

Pete is keenly aware that he cannot lie. Opening his mouth is dangerous and courageous both. “Um,” Pete says. “I haven’t told anyone this. Except Patrick, I mean. Because I didn’t know… I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Is this the shitty prelude to you telling me you have cancer?”

“I’m going to be a dad.” Pete whispers this, his lips so close to Joe’s ear they brush it. Pete is highly paranoid about the interviewer. Worse things have happened to him. Conversely, he cannot even _think_ of a worse place to have this conversation, let alone conjure one. So perhaps _worse_ is relative.

Joe pulls back so he can look at Pete’s face. He keeps one hand braced on Pete’s shoulder. Pete is comforted beyond his ability to express by the sustained contact. “And Patrick?” asks Joe.

“It has to stop,” Pete says. It feels so good, being wholly honest. No tricks, cloaks, daggers, shadows. “I want to be _good_ , Joe, really I do. But you know me. I’ve always been bad at stopping.”

“You’ve always been bad at Patrick,” Joe says. “The timing you have. It’s so bad it’s hard to think of it as an accident.” A beat passes. Pete is still connected to Joe by the closed circuit of hand-to-shoulder. This is the world’s only comfort. “Congratulations, man. Really. This could be… so good for you.”

 _Or it could be so bad._ Joe doesn’t say it, doesn’t need to. It fuzzes the air between them, already thick with unsaid truths.

“Just, like, hypothetically,” Pete says, “if someone asked you to work a miracle. Do you think you could do it? Like, do you have any spare miracles kicking around?”

Joe gives him such a measured look that Pete wonders if Joe doesn’t know, if Joe hasn’t always known, that Pete is a changeling trying to complete three impossible tasks to win his freedom and Patrick’s heart.

“If you could stay away from Patrick fucking Stump,” Joe says, “ _that_ would be a fucking miracle.”

Pete feels nauseous just thinking about it. With a weight on his chest like a boot’s just come down upon it, he wonders if Joe is right.

*

When Pete realizes he isn’t going to be able to stop, he starts preparing himself to say goodbye.

Every time he looks at Patrick, the words freeze in his throat or flee out of his head. This is not a problem Pete usually has. Most of the time, when they’re alone, they’re either yelling about a song or making out furiously, hands fumbling belts and teeth scraping lips, leaving beaded blood trails in their wake because this is _frenzy_ , not love.

Pete keeps having to remind himself this. It’s not love.

So, like he has done for years now when there is something he can’t quite say, Pete writes it into lyrics he’ll put in Patrick’s mouth instead. He writes _What A Catch._

The label has put them up in corporate housing while they battle this album. It’s not far from where he and Ash live. Pete all but flips a coin each night to decide where he’ll sleep. Inside, he feels plastic, hungry in a place food doesn’t reach. His skin aches constantly, like all the metal of LA is giving him subdermal sunburn. He keeps waking up drenched in sweat, fingers locked in rictus around the sheets, the taste of blood in his mouth, the memory of his sword in his hands. The sound of Eloissine’s laughter ringing in his ears. He wakes up this way whether he’s lying next to Ashlee or next to Patrick or by himself. Not that Pete very often wakes up by himself.

He’s heading to Patrick’s room, a torn-out notebook sheet bearing what feels like the final draft of _What a Catch_ crumpled and slightly sweaty in his hand. Pete tried to write it on the computer, but it kept making him sick, the _feeling_ of his skin on the keys. His cuticles. His awareness of his fingerbones, sliding inside, and the lattice of tissue, cellulose, and capillaries linking it all up in between. He feels like a fucking bucket of meat sewn up in a see-through skin, like if he even thinks too hard about any one inch of him, the flesh will give and guts and glamour will start gushing out.

That’s when the fucking paps come. Pete’s walking across the courtyard to the low-slung unit Patrick and Joe are rooming in—at some point Pete thought it would be easier to stay away with a courtyard between them, and anyway Patrick doesn’t want much to do with him these days, unless they’re fucking—and he’s nervous about these lyrics, about what he’s using them to say, about how Patrick will react, and he’s sick and he’s been away from Chicago for too long and he knows this for a fact because he coughed up a mat of bloody grass this morning, and he is in _no fit state_ , and his first warning is a flashbulb going off in his face.

Before Pete makes a decision about how to respond, his body’s _reacting_. It was a warrior’s body once, before it was ever a poet’s. He’s whipped the camera skidding across the courtyard to the pool and he’s got his hand around the cameraman’s collarbone and he’s got him backed up against a wall with his other fist cocked back, and if his sword wasn’t in Nassara’s care he’d already have summoned it, before he can even think _what if there’s more than one_ or _gee this would make for a really bad headline and a really good lawsuit_.

The second digital flashbulb bursts like Pete coming to his senses. He drops the pap and stumbles back, his hands raised in front of him, his face a mask of apologetic horror. “You scared the shit out of me,” Pete rasps. He’s breathing so hard. Everything is tinged red. “This is a private residence! What are you doing here at night, man?”

The first pap is rubbing his throat, staring back at Pete with a mean glint in his eye. Pete’s not looking, but he bets the camera is pretty scraped up. “I can replace the camera,” Pete says with a weary sigh, “if you give me your word you’ll stop trespassing.” Even as he makes the offer, Pete knows no mortal paparazzi would follow through with their half of the deal. All Pete’s done is cost himself a camera, traded for a tinsel lie.

“What’s it like, being away from your girlfriend for so long?” asks the second pap, the one who still has his camera and no probable grounds to file a lawsuit. Pete’s tempted to give him one. Lately you can’t even go to the grocery store as Pete Wentz and go unnoticed. When you’re a secret faerie in Los Angeles, it can be a little scary to realize you’re always being noticed. It was bad enough when Pete only had to worry about other faeries watching him with Patrick—waiting for him to slip up. Now there really isn’t even a _semblance_ of privacy. Unlike fae, paparazzi aren’t even remotely interested in being sneaky.

“Are you seeking your bandmates for a little late-night comfort while you’re away from her?” the pap pushes salaciously. “Is there trouble in paradise? Is your famous you-know-what up to the task of being faithful?”

Currently, all of Pete’s will is burning up on the act of _not_ throwing this guy in the pool. The last thing Patrick needs is a tabloid article about Pete seeking him for “late-night comfort.” The world needs a little less Pete Wentz.

“Are you asking about my penis?” Pete says calmly. The day the paps figure out he cannot lie is not a day he wants to be alive for. Because they’re right: they’ve nailed him to the fucking wall. Of course he’s not just going to Patrick to show him lyrics. He’s going to Patrick to show him lyrics, lose the courage to say _I think this is my last album with Fall Out Boy_ , and kiss Patrick’s lips til they threaten to split. He’s going to Patrick to _have_ him. He’s not proud. He felt disgusting about it before these assholes ever showed up.

“Um,” says the pap, snapping another picture to fill the beat where he’s momentarily thrown off. “Well, what’s it up to these days?”

Pete’s weary sigh is completely genuine. “I’m calling security,” he says. He pushes past the paps and goes back to his own room.

It’s not til he’s chained the door behind him that he realizes he doesn’t have _What a Catch_ with him anymore. Vaguely, he hopes the paps don’t have it. Most of him doesn’t care. Pete notices dully that he’s shivering. God, he feels so _cold_.

*

Do you ever fuck up so bad you have no choice but to keep fucking up?

Pete asks Ashlee to marry him. A month later, they are wed. In the meantime, Pete and Patrick continue to collide. There is little enough pleasure in it now. For Pete, it is only a symbol of bitterness, weakness, _pain_.

He doesn’t know what it is for Patrick. Aside from when they fight about the songs, they do not really talk. This is a suffering you could not invent. Pete does not know how he got so far from who he meant to be. He does not know how he got so far from the person who’s closest to him. He doesn’t understand how his hands find Patrick’s skin so warm when the rest of Patrick has gone so cold.

If recording is painful, the tour is worse. They take to the road in October, Pete’s favorite month. Everyone in the world knows Ash is pregnant now. There has been nonstop speculation about the motive for the marriage. It is an inauspicious start.

Pete has received gifts from Faery, gnawed-up bones and sweetly fermented organ meats and a clever cloak of feathers and a burning copper crown. _Good tidings and salutations_ , recites Nassara woodenly, bearing the Queen’s skin-prickling congratulations. Nassara has had his sword for so long, now. Pete, well-poisoned, hasn’t needed it. He takes another pill, while she visits him, and watches her edges flicker in and out of sight.

Pete becomes paranoid Eloissine will steal the baby. She would find it very amusing, he thinks, to give her pet changeling a changeling to raise. Pete has not even met this kid and he already knows he will slaughter anything that even looks twice at him. Pete wonders if he can take a newborn infant on tour. He appeals to Nassara to keep watch over his family while he is gone. She tells him no one will want to borrow against his misery. His unhappiness draws a circle of salt around everyone he loves, everything he touches. Pete does not quite believe this. If anyone touches the baby, he will burn the whole Court down.

“I need you, Trick,” Pete whispers into Patrick’s ear onstage, on electric nights when he dreams of drowning. The tour is ugly as a curse. Crowds turn up to boo at them if they play anything from _Folie_ —if they bring out any of the new things they’re so excited about. People hate Pete and they shout about it. People think they’re sell-outs and manwhores and they shout about that too. Pete doesn’t understand how the tide has turned so totally against them. Are people truly buying concert tickets just to chuck water bottles at them while they play? That shit bruises. How can they possibly be playing sold-out shows to stadiums full of kids who know every word and hate each one of them?

Pete and Patrick are supposed to stop, but they’re so bad at stopping. It’s turning to bitterness in their mouths but here their mouths are, meeting, again, again, again. Their kisses taste like Pete’s copper fear, Patrick’s slate anger. In ignominy and infamy, in infidelity, mouths meet. They kiss each other empty. Cocks, hands, mouths, friction, fucking. Nothing is enough to suck the poison out. The world is wrapped in blood-stained cotton, which should make it softer but does not. Fuck, fuck: Pete’s fucking up.

All Pete ever does is fuck up.

*

Bronx is born just before _Folie a Deux_ hits stores. Pete can’t sleep at night, thinking about his infant son, sleeping unguarded in a cradle. The thing is, Pete knows what’s out there. Pete _is_ one of the monsters that come out after dark.

The thing is, there are a lot of creatures out there who wouldn’t be unreasonable for wanting revenge. Pete’s not even convinced his own Court, his own _Queen_ isn’t one of them.

He just _knows_ that, the moment he looks away from his son—his perfect, life-rending, meaning-of-love son—something terrible is going to happen to him. He annoys Ashlee, badgering her to join them on tour with a newborn. He annoys the band, flying back to LA whenever possible and barely making it to soundcheck, once getting caught in a flight delay and arriving two hours late for a show. But the reality of Bronx, and the threats against him, is a fist around his lungs, around whatever part of a heart he’s got.

Pete is so, so scared.

Sometimes, but not all the time, Patrick’s touch helps stop the trembling.


	15. I Will Never Believe In Anything Again

_Half changeling and not half changed: such a child is uncommon._

_Beyond uncommon. I’d call it rare._

_Powerful._

_Golden as the summer with Eloissine’s own thundering through its veins…_

_I want one. Can’t I have it, Dreir? Switch it right out under their noses for me!_

_Hush, Feckle. Not this one. Blood of kings and hopes as high as any human. Not for the likes of us, no. Not at the rate you go through them. I’ll steal you another, just as golden, with much less fate, eh? Such a babe as this would make a miraculous gift…_

Pete drifts somewhere between sleeping and waking, voices muzzing around him like a gentle tide. They ebb and flow without his alteration, needing nothing. He is a stone in the sand: by current nudged, swirled with silt, and left clean. The whispers and laughter of the Unseelie Court fill his ears, almost-but-not-quite making meaning.

_Say, I know someone desperate for a miracle._

The word miracle tugs at Pete’s consciousness, floats him closer to the surface. He bobs along the undisturbed tension of his own sleeping brain, a satellite skimming dangerous close to the pull of a black hole.

_Bet he makes the trade._

_Three pounds of burning silver says you’re wrong._

_You’re on!_

When Pete wakes up, he knows without knowing what he will do. He goes to Bronx’s crib, stands silent over the stirring shadow-figure that is his sleeping son. With a skittish finger, he traces Bronx’s tiny, silken cheek, knocking aside a silver-pale curl. He inhales to fill his lungs with the scent of new life, improbable and perfect, born under a bad sign and brought home into a curse.

Pete doesn’t know how much love can make up for. Everything, he hopes.

“Pete? What are you doing up?” Ashlee’s voice startles him, rising out of a darkened corner of Bronx’s room. She must have fallen asleep in the armchair. Pete has noted the sense of unease upon the house. They are both drawn into the ritual of keeping vigil.

“I know what has to happen next,” Pete says. Even to his own ears, his voice sounds far away, muffled by more than magic. “He’s our miracle. He’s _ours_.”

In his small sleep, Bronx’s smooth, unstained fist finds Pete’s finger. In the shadows, Pete’s hands always look bloody. A trick of the light. A trick of Pete’s perception. A trick, a trap, a task. A curse.

A miracle.

“So what has to happen?” Ash asks. She sounds tired. Her voice is far away, coming from somewhere out beyond the moon. Pete can feel her slipping away. Pete can feel it all slipping away. So precariously balanced and his hands so full—he cannot hold it all. Not without something dropping.

He must choose what he can bear to drop.

“I have to look not quite as desperate.” He says it to her, to Bronx, to himself.

Bronx is a miracle, and Eloissine can’t have him. Pete believes in that.

*

By this point, they’re barely speaking to each other. Any of them.

Pete and Patrick collide in the dark at increasingly rare intervals, their bodies breaking open against each other, bruises left in the shape of fingerprints and the burning imprint of teeth outlining the roadmap of their transgressions.

If this collision is rare, conversations are even rarer.

There is no other way to say it: the tour _sucks_.

The fans hate them. The press won’t back up off Pete. His skin itches and his blood burns with the pent-up magic. He gets sloppy self-medicating, a drug-store cowboy in a shoot-out with himself. He’s gonna spin the barrel one too many times, one of these days. He takes pills to fill the spaces where his bandmates used to be. Where Patrick used to be.

Pete used to think he knew what it felt like, feeling alone.

He thinks different now.

*

They all go out to dinner together in Phoenix. It’s supposed to help—to be smoothing, to be stitches, to line up their edges again so they can go back to being pieces of the same puzzle. Lately they’re more like pieces of glass: they don’t fit together into anything, and they bloody the fingers of anyone who tries.

Which is to say—it’s not working.

Joe’s at the bar and Andy’s gone with him, floating unanchored behind Joe’s barstool and staring blankly out the floor-to-ceiling view of the vast black desert beyond the restaurant. Somehow, the desert seems fuller, warmer, four thousand times less lonely. With tight, jerking movements, Patrick is dissecting a straw wrapper to avoid looking at Pete.

Pete produces a bottle of benzos from his vest pocket and pops one into his mouth, just to see if that makes Patrick say something. He dry-swallows. Patrick’s eyes narrowing are the only indication he even notices.

“What if we change up the set list for tomorrow? I was thinking—” Pete starts, just to have something to say.

Without looking up, Patrick cuts him off. “You’re really fucking selfish, do you know that?”

Patrick’s lips are still swollen from kissing Pete like he wanted to be hitting him instead this afternon. Pete’s own lip is split, throbbing distantly in memory of the impact.

Now Patrick won’t even look up. He shreds the straw wrapper with a singular determination. Pete guesses it’s a proxy for what Patrick would like to be doing to Pete.

Does Pete know he’s selfish?

The way Pete feels about Patrick, when he lets himself feel anything at all, is _terrifying_ —crow corpse, faerie kidnapping, compelled slaughter of everyone you love, the life of his son _scary_. “I want to scream I love you at the top of my lungs, but I’m afraid that someone else will hear me,” he murmurs, more to himself than anyone.

“ _Stop it_ ,” says Patrick. “This isn’t about _you_ , it’s not about how tortured and special you are. Fuck! I’m trying to—this is how I feel! You are _hurting me_ , Pete Wentz.”

 (The way Pete feels about Ash is different than that. Less, in some ways—and Pete is grateful for that, because what he feels for Patrick is so much, _too much_ , and he’s _afraid_. Maybe that is selfish. Ashlee is a tremendous relief. Pete can’t injure her in the same way, has done his cowardly damnedest to endanger her and she’s remained safe. She needs less from him than Patrick does.)

(And Bronx. Bronx. Bronx is more of a miracle than Pete ever thought he’d get, and Pete’s _keeping_ him. Pete won’t give Bronx up for anything, not for fear or love or faeries.)

Pete is afraid, Pete is an addict, Pete is fae, Pete is a father.

Yes. Pete’s fucking selfish.

Pete doesn’t know what it feels like, being Patrick, with the imprint of Pete’s teeth on his chest while Pete parades across tabloids with his _wife_ gleaming on his arm. But he can appreciate the contradiction.

“I don’t have a choice,” says Pete. He believes it to be true.

Patrick shoves his chair back and stands up. He’s certainly looking at Pete now. His eyes burn with the furious shine of blazing oil.

“Yes, you do.” Patrick spits the words like they’re a curse. “You’re making it.”

“There’s more going on than you can understand.” Pete says it by rote, without real feeling. That last Xanax knocked all the feeling right out of him. The words are so stale. He’s so tired of saying them.

Patrick thinks he’d be happier with the truth? With a world where monsters are not only real, they wear the face of your best friend and spill your guts across the floor because a pretty faerie in a crown suggests it will amuse her? _That’s_ what Patrick would prefer?

Pete is so fucking tired.

“The crazy thing is, I’m still waiting for you to explain it to me. How fucking stupid am I? I _understand_ you exactly, Pete. What I don’t understand is why I spent so long trying not to really see you. Trying to believe you were ever anything but this.”

This is the part where something should stir in Pete, some desperate instinct to hold onto Patrick, to fix, to comfort, to smooth. To grab onto anything that will keep him from drowning. To survive.

To lie, basically. In not so many words.

In an instant Pete realizes he’d rather let Patrick think he’s right. Hell, he wishes Patrick was right. It would be so much easier if selfish was the only thing he was. Not… all the rest of this.

Besides: when you’re alone, there are no expectations. There’s no one to disappoint. There’s no one to risk. There’s no one to murder.

How’s that for a fucking choice.

“Sounds like you’ve got me all figured out,” Pete says.

For a beat Patrick just stares at him. Then: “Fucking. _Selfish_.”

“Yeah. That’s me.”

Patrick turns his back, stalks away, crosses the restaurant to join his friends at the bar. Pete sits at the table alone and tells himself he enjoys the view.

It is very important that Pete not look desperate.

*

No one, least of all Pete, is surprised when the band breaks up.

The last time they are together doesn’t feel like the last time. There is nothing that feels final or conclusive about it. Pete assumes, in whatever distant, hazy part of his brain that is still able to perform cognitive operations when he’s touching Patrick’s skin, that they will find each other like this again: stripped down and sinful, a car crash in the dark. An accident of poorly stitched constellations is all they are.

They don’t talk, the last time. They trade kisses like punches. Patrick’s hands are rough, callused and clumsy, scrabbling with Pete’s two belts. Patrick’s shirt tears a little when Pete impatiently wrenches it over his head. They tumble to the bed, legs tangled, and one of Patrick’s toenails cuts a hot gash in Pete’s calf. Somewhere along the line, pain’s gotten all tangled up with love for Pete. He pretends he doesn’t feel either.

“I’d shoot the sunshine into my veins just to feel like you,” Pete pants into Patrick’s ear. Patrick’s three fingers deep in him, their cocks crushed together by the weight of their desperate bodies. It’s the first words he’s spoken since he opened his door to Patrick’s knock.

“What a fucking catch,” Patrick growls back. The spite in his voice is so startling that Pete comes, slicking the space between them with quickly-cooling fluid. Patrick, hands too tight on Pete’s sharp hipbones, flips him over without gentleness, enters him without kindness, fucks him without relish.

Afterwards, they lay side by side, not quite touching. Pete feels a grim satisfaction, choked by impossible sadness. Patrick is so close, close enough to touch, but feels farther away than ever before. _I love you_ , Pete does not say, all too aware of the things that might be listening in the dark.

“For you, I would have worked a miracle,” he says instead. It’s a strange way of confessing, of declaring. Of apologizing. Words are such tricky fucking things. He finds only edged ones, too true and not true enough at once.

“I think it’s a good thing,” Patrick says heavily. “That we won’t be able to do this anymore. It isn’t making anyone happy.”

Pete wants to crawl out of his skin, out of his life, be anyone else. Be anyone simpler. Be anyone who could love Patrick and be loved in return. Be anyone with a whole heart. With a whole _anything_.

Pete doesn’t know an incantation or a glamour that will do that, though. In the dark, in the silence, he rolls away from Patrick and curls on his side. He tries very hard to weep without sound. He must do well enough at it: Patrick gives no indication that he’s heard. After a while, Pete’s tears run out. His eyes, dry, simply close.

The bed shifts as Patrick gets off of it. He dresses quietly and leaves Pete’s room. The door slips snugly shut behind him.

*

They play _Saturday_ for the last time, at their last show. Patrick sings, _me and Pete_. Patrick sings, _two more weeks_.

Pete doesn’t play or sing anything. Fuck last chances.

Pete’s signature emo hair falls to the stage in chunks, shorn from his head. The razor against his scalp buzzes almost, _almost_ , louder than his thoughts. He can feel a rash rising in the path left by the metal maw. Pills don’t make his outsides any less sensitive. Just his insides.

Just like that, he’s light-headed, shorn and stripped and empty. Just like that, the band is over. Fall Out Boy is over.

He’s supposed to say goodbye, somehow. Goodbye to Patrick. Goodbye to his band. Pete can’t.

He flies to Chicago instead. He gets so drunk he doesn’t know what he does. Alcohol and pills, too many pills: he doesn’t much care if it’s a deadly mix. Never mind what he promised Bronx. Never mind what he promised Patrick. He counts on his immortal fae liver to turn aside whatever poison is too much. He doesn’t know or care whether this is a fool hope.

It’s not a lie if you meant it when you said it. It’s not a lie if it comes untrue later all on its own.

Pete wakes up, half-naked and bleedingly hungover, on the side of the Hill. The sun beats down upon him. His skin is brown, scabby, and slightly luminescent, shining in a way that reminds him of scales.

It is not the skin he went to sleep in.

Pete scrambles, lurching, to his feet. His prods and pinches his arms, his stomach. He shimmies out of his skinny jeans and stares at his legs. Nut-brown, bark-brown, with an opal shimmer. It’s rough to the touch like his whole skin is a callus rubbed the wrong way.

It’s not what he imagined. Not that he ever really imagined _this_.

Pete wakes up, half-drunk on the side of the Hill, clad for the first time in his own skin.

*

Pete’s half-tempted to wear this skin home, but the worst thing he can think of is that Bronx won’t recognize him, that Bronx will be _scared_. So he goes under the Hill, its mercurial hallways spinning with his half-successful poisoning, and looks for someone who can turn him back.

Nassara is the closest thing he has to someone he can trust, to someone who knows him. He looks for her first.

He feels embarrassed, strangely naked: he passes pixies in the hall who titter and point, with none of the manners typically attributed to the fae. His skinny jeans, torn a little from wrestling them back on over his strangely angular, unyielding skin, do not conceal enough. He can’t even tell if they recognize him. He can’t even tell how humiliated he should be.

That is one question answered, at least, when he does find Nassara. She’s sitting soberly in the emptied-out great hall, having stepped over the prone and snoring bodies of several fae to get to the hewn dining table where she has seated herself. She stares distastefully into a tankard of thick, chewy breakfast ale, and picks at something full of tiny bones that bleeds bleakly onto her trencher. The slow-motion dead _plash_ of its juices dripping onto wood turns Pete’s already tumbling stomach one too many times. He clamps his teeth against a tiny wave of bile that climbs his throat. Horribly, he swallows it, then spits to try to clear the taste onto the earthen floor.

“Are you drinking that?” he says by way of greeting.

Nassara scowls at him, but shoves her mug across the uneven table. “Take it and go, whelp,” she rumbles, a volcano of a woman. “I haven’t time for whatever it is you’re wanting.”

Pete realizes with a jolt that she doesn’t recognize him after all. With one numb hand, he feels his own face. He can’t tell what he looks like, whether the face he’s wearing now bears any resemble to the face of the boy whose life he stole. He supposes it does not. There’d be no reason for it to. In one world or another, what was he but an unwanted _whelp_? Maybe Nassara sees him clearly after all.

He takes a huge, needy gulp of the ale. He chews. He swallows. It is wrenching, grainy, and tastes like silty muck from the bottom of a pond. Stars, it’s good. Pete grinds the grit between his teeth appreciatively. It leaves a pungent tang of fermentation at the back of his throat. The world is less spinny already.

“Can you tell me what I am?” It is not the question Pete meant to ask, but it parts his lip nonetheless.

Nassara raises her narrowed eyes from her unsettling breakfast and lays them on Pete. “You’re a tree-skinned pain in the ass,” she grates out, all but growling, “about to be a few limbs lighter if you don’t leave a knight to her breakfast.”

Pete leans over the table, reaches into the empty air at Nassara’s right hip, and pulls his own sword free and into being. Too hungover and emotionally fucked for delicacy, he slams it onto the table in front of his old compatriot. His old friend.

“That is not your sword,” she says, her hands braced on the table with the dangerous promise of movement.

“That is exactly what it is,” Pete says back, his hands a mirror of hers. (That his are braced rather more for sickness and stability does not bear upon his menace. He hopes.)

Nassara freezes, stares hard into his face, his whiskey-colored eyes. “Pete?” she breathes. “Rhododendron and _fucking_ azalea. Who did _what_ to you?”

Swept by the relief of the tension breaking, the horror and confusion of having stripped off his own skin, the possibility of having lost his face and life and wife and son forever in one blind moment of grief, Pete collapses onto the bench across from his old friend. He rests his forehead on the burning hilt of his sword, savoring the sting. It is all that grounds him to reality. What a thin thing that is.

“I did, I think,” he moans into the tabletop. “I tore off my own skin.”

It feels like the realization of the crappy metaphor he’s been living for the last, oh, eighteen years or so. He laughs in spite of himself. He lifts his head just enough to slop some more ale into his mouth. He hopes his bark won’t stain.

“I ended my band. I left him for good. I tore off my own starsfucked skin.” He grinds through the list unflinchingly, shows the tabletop his teeth in a grim not-quite-smile. More out of habit than out of hope, Pete asks, “Is it a miracle yet? Nassara, do you think it’s a miracle?”

Tears, unexpected, sting at the corner of his new eyes. Pete didn’t know tree sprites or ents or stickbugs or whatever he is, exactly, could cry. All this time, he had no idea faeries could cry.

With awkward tenderness, Nassara places her gauntleted, breakfast-oiled hand to cover his. With the heavy softness of drowning, she says, “You spill over with miracles, whelp. They stream off you like starlight. The question you should be asking is: do you want to go back?”

Pete’s brain sticks and churns on the question. Back where? But then he realizes: to his life. To his fucked-up car crash Pete Wentz life. This is a way out that doesn’t require poisoning or the breaking of oaths. This is a way out that’s comfortable and easy as dying in your sleep. Possibilities, feather-light, touch down on his face and arms and shoulders, drifting across the tabletop in the shape of a new beginning, that same ice-white promise as fresh-fallen snow.

“I have to,” Pete hears himself say. It’s a good thing his mouth knows the words, because his head hadn’t yet decided. “For Bronx. For my family. For this—this chance.”

Nassara nods. He can’t tell whether her frown indicates approval, disapproval, or total neutrality. “Finish drinking your breakfast, then, and let’s get you to the face-changer. I hope you haven’t spent every virtue you might have used to bargain, Peter. She won’t weave you a skin for free.”

Pete takes another hearty gulp from the large tankard. That’s the problem every time, isn’t it. That’s the entire point. There’s not a damn thing Pete Wentz has to offer than any other creature would ever fucking want.

*

The face-changer looks, to the extent it looks like _anything_ natural or unnatural, magical or mundane, earthly or otherwise that Pete has ever seen, like a two-legged spider made of whisks. Its hands are the part Pete, nauseated and dizzy all over again, can’t tear his eyes away from. Six articulated needles clink together in place of fingers. Brassy Victorian scissor halves take the place of thumbs.

Pete keeps stealing glances at its face, to see if he’s been caught staring, but of course it has no face. Its dark fleshy head is blank and hairless, horrible. Dark blue veins run ridges through it. Pete wonders if they pulse or twitch to indicate expressions. He does not wish to find out. He looks back at the thin sharp fingers.

“I need a glamour,” Pete greets the otherworldly thing. He thrusts his phone out towards it, not sure if it can see at all, let alone what which part of its anatomy it might use to do so. Something makes a slithering sound beneath its loose crimson cloak, which billows in a breeze Pete does not feel.

“This glamour,” Pete says, indicating the picture of himself pulled up on his phone.

Nassara hisses impatiently behind him. It is poor manners and worse bargaining to open with exactly what you want. Pete doesn’t care. He’s never been much for finesse or subtlety.

The flesh lump ripples horribly, then stretches in the center. A single large green eye blinks open with the sound of tearing skin. Pete’s breakfast ale sloshes uneasily in his stomach, threatening to introduce itself to the floor.

The eye blinks at the image in Pete’s shaking hand. Another wet rip and words warble out of a flapping hollow hole to the side of the eye. Loose ends of skin flutter like tongues, shaping syllables. There is nothing at all about the hole that suggests a mouth.

“That face is someone else’s,” says the face-changer. The sibilant voice is smooth as a glass bottle, jagged as its shattered edges. Pete suppresses a shudder.

“It was mine until this morning,” says Pete, continuing to ignore Nassara’s warning hisses and coughs.

“ _No_ ,” the face-changer says so forcefully its speaking-hole rips wider. Strings of skin dangle like shredded poultry, like stretched dough. It is no longer a matter of _if_ he’s sick, Pete reflects. It has become only a question of where and when. “Never yours, always stolen. Thieves pay _extra_.”

Pete’s run through a mental catalogue of his assets, and they’re either of no use or interest to fae, like human wealth, or absolutely not up for trade, like Pete’s own half-human child. There’s nothing else worth having he’s ever had that he hasn’t broken, lost, or thrown away. Or given.

Pete thinks back on his oaths, his love, his words, his body, his name. There’s a lot he’s given away. There’s a lot that’s been taken.

Pete wonders if the real owner of his fake face has the same problem. It’s another one of those things he hopes never to know. One Pete Wentz is so much more than enough to deal with. That’s probably why he stripped his skin off in the first place: the world needs a little less Pete Wentz.

“I don’t know what I have to offer you,” Pete says, too honest as always. Nassara swipes a kick at his ankle for that one. He’s all but _inviting_ this nightmare creature to set the terms. If Pete possessed even an ounce of self-preservation, he too would recognize this as a terrible stratagem. But self-preservation is just another one of the things he’s lost, and learned to live without.

The face-changer clacks its needles together in either agitation or excitement. The eye has receded into the head. Wet sucking noises come out of the hole that’s left.

“Its heart,” the thing wheezes. Definitely excitement. Moisture of unknown provenance slicks the flaps of its mouth.

“I’m a changeling,” Pete says stubbornly, flippantly. This is one belief about himself he cannot afford to let slip. “I don’t have a heart.”

Six needles prick his chest. The nicked edge of the scissor blade taps a tearing rhythm against his filthy t-shirt. “Thump thump,” slurps the face-changer. “Thump thump.”

“Not even you would be so foolish,” Nassara protests, grabbing Pete’s shoulder forcefully, the perfect inverse of the face-changer’s feather-light puncture. “Not even you are this fucking stupid!”

“One year,” says the face-changer. Thick clear fluid runs down the bottom half of its non-face. “One mortal year of _thump thump_. Can’t miss what it says it doesn’t have. Don’t need it, never has.” It begins to make a guttural choking sound that Pete can’t decide if he should hope is laughter.

The face-changer is right. Pete’s always saying he has no heart, and now he has no Patrick either. Why should he miss a year of heartbeats?

“It won’t hurt me?” he asks. He’s not _quite_ such a fool. “I won’t die?”

“It won’t feel a _thing_.” The face-changer bounces on its freakish joints, its fingerpricks bringing blood to the surface of Pete’s skin. Blood for binding.

“Peter, do _not_ ,” Nassara starts, but Pete’s mind is made up, however little that particular organ may be worth.

“By my blood, I accept the terms of this agreement,” says Pete. A high keening sound begins to come out of the shivering, slavering face-changer. Its head is less flesh than gaping, cavernous hole. Tearing and sucking sounds fill the air. Its needles pierce deeper and the face-changer is right: Pete feels nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Yes this is hurting both of us_
> 
>  
> 
> Next: blood and silence.


	16. I'll Be In The Desert Just Wishing On Every Star, Scuba Diving In The Wishing Well

Pete goes home empty.

He stays that way.

He goes home with a shorn head and the memory of recently shorn skin. It is restored, looks the same to him as it ever did, but something is irrevocably different now. Pete thinks it’s deeper than glamour can reach.

Idly, he takes up the habit of tearing off tiny slivers of his own glamoured skin, and smoothing the magic back down again. Sometimes it works better than others. His magic comes out smoother, more tame, with the poison of too many anti-anxiety pills. He practices with giving himself new tattoos, pressing a handprint of heat into his own skin and lifting his palm to watch color bloom and swirl beneath.

He’s got nothing else to do. Might as well practice magic.

Pete stays home with Bronx, who is growing both slower and faster now that Pete is here to look at him without interruption. When they were touring—and already that feels like another country, another kingdom, scenes from the life of some other person—the pictures and visits and videochats, all feeling so achingly distant in time, like Pete was missing everything, and he never quite could tell if he wanted to see Bronx more because he loved him and he was terrified for him or because he felt guilty, because somehow he thought this tiny baby boy might keep him stronger, keep him from battering himself senseless against his own sins, keep him good, keep him from Patrick—

When they were touring, and Pete did not see Bronx nearly enough, he had seemed to grow in _bursts_. One day he’d be a nugget in a onesie with blond tufts of hair on his head, the next Ash would say he was smiling, gurgling tiny almost-words, rolling himself over, beginning to scoot across the hardwood, generally turning into a tiny little _person_ with a tiny personality, all without Pete there to watch.

Well, now Pete hardly takes his eyes off the kid.  He’s having trouble sleeping at night. He doesn’t feel fear, not exactly, but his mind chases and gnaws with _worry_ that pills won’t drown out. He is so keenly aware of how easy it would be for Eloissine to snatch him. Replace him. Punish Pete in this new way, even though it’s clear to all he’s given up on the only miracle he was ever near enough to touch—to lay his filthy lips on. Pete barely blinks, seems like. Even with as close as Pete’s watching, he never quite catches Bronx in the act of growing.

Bronx turns one and Pete tries so, so hard to feel it. He didn’t think about this part. He didn’t think.

He just. He just didn’t want to lose anything else. He had to get his stolen face back. He _had_ to.

Pete goes home empty.

He stays that way.

*

Fall Out Boy has been over all of four months when Pete’s Google alert announces that Patrick’s announced a solo project.

This is the first Pete’s heard of Patrick since that night in October when, instead of saying goodbye, Pete shaved his head, ran away, and stripped all his skin off. At least, Pete hopes they didn’t speak that night. He still doesn’t remember most of it.

A solo project. Patrick, on his own, _at last_. There is no more concise or eloquent way to say _I don’t need you_. It’s so elegant this way, with the message more thoroughly delivered when it’s not sent with words.

Andy is sending words. He keeps leaving Pete these voicemails, like he hasn’t gathered from the way Pete’s not picking up the phone that Pete doesn’t much feel like talking.

The most recent one goes like this:

_You have to call me back eventually, buddy._ A long pause. _You’re the one who left, you know that? And I… I’m not saying I wouldn’t have been the next one out the door. Things were ugly and like, we all have some work we need to do on ourselves, and I’m not gonna pretend you aren’t a big part of that. But you left, Pete. You did it. You took the rest of us out of the decision and you just fucking announced it, the same way you announced… everything along the way. Like you believed everything they printed about you in the press, including that you’re the one in charge and we’re just your posse or something._ A heavy sigh. _You know the reason I don’t usually talk this much is because eventually, it starts coming out stupid. I’m not trying to be hurtful. I’m trying to explain that you’re being hurtful._ Another long pause. _I don’t know if you need more time to cool off or if you feel like burning bridges, and the reason I don’t know is self-evident, isn’t it, given that I’m saying this to your voicemail instead of to you. But you have to call him, Pete. And fucking call me too, while you’re at it._ A short pause, his voice turning almost affectionate in spite of itself. _Asshole_.

Guilt is just one entry on the long list of things Pete can’t feel anymore.

Pete doesn’t call him back.

*

He starts to make a game of it—a terrible, reckless little game. How long can he last before he becomes so ill, so _homesick_ , he’s forced back to Chicago? How many pills can he take at a time, how many times a day, to stop the symptoms? How much added poison does the blood require to cloud and cover the sanguine wickedness already coursing through?

It is a game without winners, like Russian roulette with six empty chambers. It gives Pete a grim almost-feeling that reminds him of a bleak sort of joy. He’s got nothing else to do. He might as well keep playing.

The last time he was in Chicago, he brought back a jar of dirt. He’s got a theory that proximity to sacred, Chicagoland Unseelie soil will somehow delay the onset of the Faerie withdrawal, the homesickness that snags and sickens him when he’s too far, or too long, from the place that never felt like home.

Pete’s curious if the dirt might work like an antibiotic. He takes to sprinkling some on his cereal each morning. (Bronx, golden-headed as California itself, gets some too. He asks for it. And anyway, it can’t hurt, can it? Pete can’t decide if it’s protecting him or stunting his growth, keeping him so far from the hill that isn’t home. It’s a risk Pete’s willing to take. His kid was probably going to be short no matter what.) The dirt leaves a dry, unpleasant taste on his tongue, a thick feeling in his mouth, and flecks of grit between his teeth. Pete eats it anyway. After all, disgust is just a feeling.

*

Eventually, even with the dirt, Chicago calls him home. Eventually, Pete has to go back to where he’s from. He’s as empty in Chicago as he was in LA. Bloodier here, though. He swings swords elbow-to-elbow with Nassara and his old knight friends, the ones who might have killed him one day, if he hadn’t given up on Patrick, himself, and everything else. He picks it up again with little ceremony; the hilt recalls his hand, his hand the hilt. There is nothing to remark upon, here: a killer with a blade. Nothing could be more ordinary. He drinks dwarven mead and faerie wine in Eloissine’s dark, claustrophobic hall. He bows and scrapes, torments and slaughters, for the amusement of the Court. His body is remade in bruises, which he practices magicking smooth. He’s good at moving blood around, always has been. Why shouldn’t he do it with magic as well as with his sword? When he tries to smooth cuts closed, they have a tendency to spring wider.

Idly, he wonders what human blood tastes like. Fae blood has no iron in it. It doesn’t even smell the same. There are plenty of Unseelie he could ask, who would know, who might even offer to show him. But it’s only an idle curiosity. There is no urgency, anymore.

It’s not just Andy’s voicemails Pete’s ignoring. He doesn’t call anyone back. In the evening, he goes back to his hotel room and lies flat on the bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for a summons to come from the Queen. If one does, he shrugs into his armor, materializes his sword, and heads out to wreak ruin. If one doesn’t, he’s liable to just stare all night. Sometimes, he forgets about blinking.

Sometimes, on his way home from the killing fields, bloody and empty as ever, Pete finds himself skulking down Patrick’s street, a black hoodie zipped up over oaken armor. It isn’t fooling anyone.

The thing is this: Pete goes to Chicago and he doesn’t see Patrick. It’s the only thing he doesn’t do, if the Perez Hilton headlines are to be believed. There’s no manner of debauchery he holds himself back from, king of his very own court at Angels and Kings, filling himself to grinning with somebody else’s smiles, mouth, body, booze. Maybe some part of him knows his bad behavior will make the tabloids. Maybe some part of him hopes Patrick will see, will know Pete was near enough to touch and _didn’t_. Maybe some part of him hopes Patrick will miss him. Will feel guilty about the silence.

Patrick isn’t on the list of people whose voicemails Pete doesn’t return. Patrick is on the list of people who don’t leave voicemails. Who don’t even call.

The thing is this: if all of Chicago feels like Patrick anyway, what difference does it make whose street Pete skulks on? What difference does it make whose warm, happy windows he watches?

Pete stands outside, looking in, and tries to use just the right amount of magic to warm his skin without singeing it. There are more precise spells for keeping warm—including wearing a fucking jacket, or not choosing endurance standing in the Chicago winter for a hobby—but Pete prefers this one. Cold, he can feel. Heat too.

If Patrick were to touch him now. If Patrick were to wrench open his front door, run down the frozen front steps in his sock feet, and fly directly into Pete’s arms. If Patrick were to grip the outside of Pete’s shoulders in that serious way of his, look wonderingly up into Pete’s scratched and bloody face, and bring their lips to touch in slow, deliberate motion. If that were to happen.

If nothing else, Pete could feel the warmth.

*

Pete makes the mistake of thinking that if he blocks out Eloissine’s influence, her compulsion, he will no longer do terrible things.

He’s wrong.

Pete has to stop forgetting. _He_ is the terrible thing.

He finds Bebe, the point of whom is that she is not Patrick, and goes through the hollow motions of starting another band. He needs something to do. He is losing it, surely and not very slowly, on his own. His bad behavior makes headlines, lights up gossip columns. He and Ashlee fight and it’s worse than usual. Pete is the make-out king, the kid time can’t touch, the pop punk prince who ran away to Neverland so he’d never, never have to grow up. Pete is a wicked changeling. He’s never been a real boy at all.

It isn’t the stuff that makes headlines, though, that is really tearing him apart. It is the quiet ways he dirties and devalues himself, the way no one but Ashlee and tiny Bronx ever have to see. The way he can go a whole week without bathing, without changing out of the same pair of sweatpants, the way he doesn’t even count the pills anymore except by swallowing. The way he lets anyone think and say anyone about him. How sometimes he makes it through the day without ever even standing up, and feels a grim sense of satisfaction from that, his accomplishments in playing dead. The way his main hobby has become wishing himself out of existence. He pales and cringes under the heat of stage lights. He withers in front of flashbulbs. Even with a microphone, he barely has a voice. There aren’t a lot of lyrics in Black Cards songs. Pete doesn’t have a lot to say.

_I’ve got sunshine in my bones_ , he writes for Bebe to sing, not reminding him of Patrick at all. _How do I get it out of them?_

*

Pete is having a birthday party for Brendon Urie. He is joylessly drunk, his house raucous and swollen with the merriment of people he cares nothing for. It’s no fault of theirs. They’re meant to be his friends. Pete is the hollow one, the simulacrum. Maybe the real wearer of his face could do better than just rattling through these halls, shaping the phrases that indicate what he knows he’s supposed to feel, a conduit for nothing. He’s been cooped-up and isolated, which is why he offered to host this party at all. Now that everyone’s here, he wishes he was just with Bronx instead, eating pizza, wearing sweatpants.

He does a shot with Brendon, a transaction that signifies a connection he can’t quite feel, and glamours himself a sloppy smile so people stop asking if he’s okay. He’s not, of course—Pete’s not anything. Brendon is so young, it almost hurts.

Pete has been old for centuries.

Pete’s still wearing his paste-on smile when the doorbell rings. A man and a crate are on his stoop. The man wears a cap. The crate’s stamped _fragile_. “Evening, sir,” says the capped man. “Are you Mr. Wentz?”

Pete eyes the crate. It’s quite large, could be bursting with sixteen kinds of horror. You have to be careful with names. “Could be,” says Pete, which is not a lie, the same way a glamour of a smile is not a lie. “What’s in the box?”

Cap Man shakes his clipboard meaningfully. “I’ve got a shipping manifest right here,” he says, “for Mr. Wentz.”

“I didn’t order anything,” Pete says. Curiosity does not prickle, tingle, or nudge. He is the living equivalent of a shrug. Pete moves to close the door.

“For fuck’s sake,” says Cap, exasperated. “I can plainly see you’re Pete Wentz, okay? You’re pasted all over my daughter’s bedroom door. I just need to you verbally confirm your identity and initial here and we can all move on with our lives.”

Pete can see he’s making things difficult for Cap, he really can. It’s just that it doesn’t much move him. The crate looks heavy; he wonders if Cap will go away quicker if Pete helps him carry it back to the truck. But it also seems like a subpoena type thing, like once he touches it, it’ll be his. Pete does not care to find out what is inside the crate. He feels sick just looking at it. It smells of earth and oak and Chicago rain.

“I didn’t order anything large and ominous,” Pete repeats. It’s an odd time of day to receive a delivery.

Cap flips a page on his clipboard, scanning for something. Pete’s sense of foreboding grows. Behind him, his house throbs with music. The whole world is too loud. Pete needs at least two more drinks and he’d like them without delay. “Sender, sender,” Cap is muttering. It sounds like the beginning of an incantation. Tension ripples ramrod down Pete’s spine. His right hand begins to conjure the feel of the hilt of his sword.

Then Cap Man says, “There! Sender: Patrick Stump.”

Pete’s right hand relaxes all on its own, magic draining limply out of it.

The tension remains.

“Someone you know?” Cap prompts.

It feels like a trap, but so does everything. Besides, it’s not like Pete can lie. “Could be,” he says. The thing is, the closest he’s come to feeling _anything_ in these last nine months is right now, when this random delivery man knows Pete’s name and face but not Patrick’s. If you ever needed proof of a fucked-up world, look no further.

A look spasms across Cap’s face. Pete would describe it as a grimace. With an exaggerated flourish, he plucks the pen from his clipboard. His face is darkening as blood fills it. “Here’s what we’re gonna do, buddy,” he says. The veneer of amicability stretched over his tone is tight and straining. “This is the last delivery of my day, and if you don’t take it now, I get to haul it all the way back to the distribution center, fill out a whole pile of paperwork, and then drag it the fuck back up here and hope to find a more reasonable and clear-minded Pete Wentz tomorrow.” Pete burps a little, at the worst possible moment in this character assassination monologue. “So why don’t you go inside, find _someone_ who’ll sign as Pete Wentz—at this point I don’t care who—and we don’t have to do this again tomorrow.”

Pete considers this proposal. Then Pete asks, “Can’t you just, you know, return to sender?” He’s not sure yet if he wants the crate returned to Patrick, but he’d like to know what his options are.

“Sure I can,” says Cap through gritted teeth. “After three failed delivery attempts.”

“Well that sounds exhausting for all of us,” Pete concedes.

He takes the pen. He signs the manifest.

Now the crate is his.

*

His house is full of the young, drunk, and lovely. Pete feels nothing at all about them. He feels something about this crate, though—very nearly. If Pete had a dolly, he’d wheel the thing around to the guest house and open it privately. As it is, he goes ahead and pries it open in the firefly-speckled California dusk of his front stoop.

It’s less horrific and more horrible than he imagined: Patrick has returned his things.

_All_ of his things. Eight years of things. Two guitars, one bass with a busted fretboard and one unloved acoustic from his collection he’d given Patrick to keep; exactly seven mismatched socks; two hoodies; three jackets; a belt; Pete’s long-lost Doc Martens; thirteen CDs and two vinyls Pete thought were gone forever, five of which he has since replaced; a bonfire’s worth of borrowed and abandoned books, notebooks, sheets of looseleaf and folded notes. Sheet music, sunglasses, chargers from Pete’s last three phones, a necklace, a bandana, Pete’s teeth from the 16 Candles video, a sheaf of photographs, Pete’s old video camera, all the seeing stones with holes in them Pete ever found and left lying around half-hoping Patrick would find and use them, four toothbrushes, assorted toiletries, no fewer than nine Urban Decay eyeliner pencils, a handful of feathers Pete has snuck into Patrick’s pockets over the years for protection against illness and omens. Basically, eight years of ephemera, of the _stuff_ that constitutes a friendship—the sediment of shared spaces and overlapping lives. All the little pieces, the evidence that Pete was a fixture, was a part of Patrick. That Pete was coming back. That Patrick was a place Pete could come back to.

(Pete hasn’t packed his Patrick stuff away, hasn’t even begun to untangle it from his life. Pete wonders if this means Patrick wants his Bowie shirt back. Once, he’s sure he’d have felt one way or another about it. He tries, in this moment, his hardest to care. To feel hurt, anger, grief. To feel _loss_. All he feels is a dulled-out regret: it’s a comfortable t-shirt.)

The box holds all this and one more thing: a knit grey hat. The one Pete put on Patrick’s head before one of their first shows, when he was so freaked out he was trying to bail. The first thing Pete ever gave him, his boy, so good glowing golden Pete still can’t quite believe he’s real. Patrick may not be _magic_ , but he’s magic beyond all doubt. He’s the most amazing thing Pete has ever—

Actually, scratch that. Actually Pete can believe it. Now that Pete’s lost him, Patrick seems so much more realistic. So much more true to life. With a little less gold, a little less shimmer, a little less shine. Patrick’s just the latest in a long string of people who have given up on Pete.

There’s nothing magic about that at all.

Pete leaves the rifled crate on the doorstep. He doesn’t care what happens to it. He doesn’t care about anything.

Pete goes inside. Pete _drinks_.

*

The next thing Pete knows, he’s alone in his and Ashlee’s bedroom, laying on his back on the bed and staring up at the skylight. Smog and enchantment make hazy the distance between Pete and the stars.

He isn’t sure how he got up here, when he left the party, or why he’s listening to his phone ring and ring against his ear—Pete does not recall making any particular decisions that led him to this point—but then whoever he’s calling picks up, sounding gruff and very annoyed as they say, “What is so fucking _urgent_ ,” and of course it’s Patrick because who could it ever possibly be but Patrick.

There is something struggling in Pete’s chest, a large and choking pressure. He almost, almost feels it. It’s almost, almost a feeling.

In California, it is 2:13am. In Chicago, it’s an even less decent hour. Pete doesn’t remember dialing, has never decided anything in his life and therefore cannot be held accountable for any of his actions, but actually now that Patrick’s asking, Pete knows exactly why he’s called.

“You sent my stuff to me,” Pete says flatly. He wants it to mean… something, that’s why he says it, but he can’t tell if he ought to be angry or sad, nostalgic or grateful, aggressive or soft. He ends up just being… factual.

Stating facts is not a good enough reason to drunk dial someone you have not spoken to in nine months at four in the morning Illinois time. Even if they used to be your best friend. Even if they’ve always been your soulmate.

“It’s yours,” Patrick replies. Also factual. Patrick sounds pissed, but that could just be the 4am, 9 months thing.

“Not all of it.” Fucking hawthorn, Pete feels… he feels… he almost feels _something_. “Some of it I gave to you.”

“Stands to reason that if I sent it back, I must not want it.” The more he wakes up, the angrier Patrick starts to sound. It sounds vital and warm. Pete wishes he could feel it too. “I can’t believe that _you_ of all fucking people think it’s a good idea to call me drunk in the middle of the night to discuss the pragmatics of _gift-giving_.” He’s practically snarling. A little push further, and in-person Patrick would have Pete backed up against a wall, curses and kisses quick on his full red lips.

“Fae are very particular about gifts,” Pete says. He says it because he’s drunk and stupid and so very empty. He says it because he can’t imagine a worse consequence than what he’s living already and because if someone else _can_ , well, maybe if it’s painful enough, Pete will finally feel something.

He says it because he’s stopped believing in miracles. Finally and fully. He says it because he’s given up hope.

“Fuck you, Pete,” Patrick says, very quietly. He stays on the line, just breathing, for three minutes and forty-two seconds that may as well be a lifetime, a lifeline, and then he hangs up the phone.

Pete still hasn’t thought of a damn thing to say.

Pete is frozen in time, space, nothing. He stares at the gauzy stars and wills himself to cry, to produce just _one_ tear to symbolize the galaxy of his loss.

He can’t.

He can’t feel anything.

Pete came home empty.

He stays that way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise it gets easier after this one.
> 
> Thank you for reading, thank you for your sweet life-sustaining comments, I treasure you all


	17. I Cast A Spell Over The West To Make You Think Of Me

When it comes back, it comes back all at once, like a building collapsing on top of him. There is no warning for this kind of catastrophe—this scale of devastation.

He spends the first week just sobbing, gasping for breath, and sobbing some more. He can’t remember ever crying so much before in his life. It’s like someone’s died. It’s worse than that—it’s like someone’s come back to life.

It’s like Pete’s come back to life.

It doesn’t make things any easier. Pete is finally forced to admit he’s got a heart, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s too late to save so many things.

By the time Pete’s feeling comes back, his marriage is already over. Ashlee has found someone else, someone who can actually love her. Pete doesn’t blame her for this. He knows he is not easy to be around under the best of circumstances. The past year has not been the best of circumstances. In the end, Eloissine did not have to take Ash from him; Pete gave her away all on his own. It’s a grey area, maybe, whose fault his bargain with the face-changer really is—who the consequences fall upon. For once, though, Pete is choosing to be accountable for the things he’s done. So when Ash wants out, he doesn’t protest. He lets her go.

Once he moves out of Ashlee’s house, splitting custody with Bronx down the middle—then Pete’s _really_ alone. Then he can _really_ set to self-destructing. There’s no one there to hold himself back for, no one who cares enough to hold him back.

It’s a relief.

Pete decompensates.

*

He doesn’t know why he agrees to do it.

He hasn’t showered in over a week, hasn’t shaved in much longer than that—and he’s using the length of his beard as a unit of measurement, here, because he hasn’t really been noticing units of time, lately—and nothing sounds worse, honestly, than putting real pants on and getting up in front of people, wearing his shame in public for the pleasure of their scorn. Isn’t it getting old, hating Pete Wentz? Isn’t he irrelevant yet? Hasn’t he already dragged his own cross up the hill and been nailed to it?

Maybe it’s just the long habit of acquiescing—of being compelled. Of doing what he’s told. He’s been in someone’s service his whole life. There’s never been a time he fought and won.

So the Black Cards label suggests he should host some radio station’s Jingle Ball, and then they suggest it more forcefully, and then he’s wearing skinny jeans and a military jacket and a v-neck up on a stage, announcing bands instead of being in one, feeling like he’ll never perform again, not in any way that matters. Reporters are asking him why he doesn’t have eyeliner on like they can’t tell that _everything is different without Fall Out Boy_ and he’s announcing in public that the band’s not coming back and he wouldn’t play with them if they did, saying, “It would take a miracle to get the band back together again,” and the words burn so bitterly on his tongue that he gets another beer and carries it up on stage. It’s loud in the club; no one will notice if the emcee slurs a little. This turns into a slope he slips down, and then he’s drunk as shit and falls down and bashes his head open, and his blood is everywhere and only the club lights conceal that it’s not quite the right color.

All told, it’s a pretty shitty night in the life of Pete Wentz.

Drunk, bloody, and holding his scalp shut with his goddamn hands, Pete sits in the ER waiting room and wishes more than anything he wasn’t here alone.

He wants to call Patrick. It is sharp and startling. He remembers too clearly the last time he called Patrick, the spectacular way he has failed to make anything better since then, and knows he can’t do that. Even with blood in his eyes, on his lips, on his chin, he knows he won’t call Patrick.

The thing is this: Pete has other friends. Pete has lots of friends, in theory. There are many, many contacts in his cell phone. He’s got a lot of friends on Facebook. He gets tons of emails and party invites and texts. He belongs to a whole fucking court of the just-loyal-enough he could call upon. He’s in a new band. But he can’t really think of anyone he wants to talk to, with Ashlee ruled out and Bronx way too young to be comforting his bleeding dad in an emergency room. He just knows he doesn’t want to be alone anymore.

Pete calls Joe. He’s surprised when Joe answers.

“I don’t even remember the last time I got a call from Pete fucking Wentz,” Joe says. He sounds wondering more than confrontational.

“I didn’t know if you’d pick up.” Pete can say this because it’s incredibly true.

“I thought about it,” Joe admits. “But then I thought, like, what if Pete’s in the hospital or something, how shitty will I feel.”

“Um,” Pete says. “Actually.”

“Goddamn it,” says Joe.

“It’s, uh—remember when you split my head open with your guitar?”

“Fondly.” Joe says dryly.

“Well, instead of your guitar, it was an amp. And instead of Joe Troh Murder-Spinning, it was just me being a disaster.” Joe laughs, and Pete is gratified. “I’m okay, most likely. Still waiting to see the doctor. It’s been a weird night, and I guess the whole faceful of blood thing made me think of you.”

“Pete?”

“Yeah?”

“You don’t have to wait til your head gets bashed open to call. Just. As a general principle.”

It takes a minute before Pete is able to say, “Thanks, Joe.”

He really fucking means it.

*

That was the low point. After that, somehow, things start to get… better.

Well, almost: sometimes before it gets better, the darkness gets bigger.

Things still aren’t right between them when Soul Punk is announced. Pete doesn’t know how to congratulate Patrick, not with all those months of silence between them.

Pete plays Patrick’s singles on loop, filling the room with his voice for no better reason than to hurt himself, than to revel in his _ability to be hurt_ , and he tries to write Patrick a note.

He tries at least nine times.

Pete Wentz is no stranger to writer’s block, but this is different. The problem is he doesn’t have a true thing to say that can fix this, or really even address it adequately. His hand keeps getting stuck on the page, at the point just between half-truth and lie.

He can’t even say he’s sorry, because he’s not. Just like whichever bark-skinned fae  brought him into the world and then discarded him, just like his human parents, just like Ashlee—his band didn’t want him anymore. He was too much and not enough all at once. He understands. He doesn’t blame them. He feels the same way about Pete Wentz, really, as everyone else does. The difference is that they could leave him, and he can’t. He’s stuck in this skin. He’d lose the best thing in his life if he shed it again.

Pete’s jealous. He envies the ease with which they left him.

Pete stares at the page in front of him. He’d thought his hand was stuck, but sloppily on the lined page are the words,

_Patrick—what if I can change?_

It is a brand-new thought.

Faeries are famous for being changeable but not changing—having a poor understanding of consequences, of linearity, of time. They exist outside of entropy. Their childlike self-absorption is absolute; their lives are too long to be anything but petty. They are old and strange and unknowable. They are impossible to predict and always the same.

Pete, though—Pete was only _born_ fae. He was raised human.

What if Pete can change?

Pete doesn’t send the note. Instead, he goes to the Soul Punk shows.

He goes to all of them.

*

The first time he sees Patrick Stump in over a year, Patrick is white blond, skinny as hell, wearing a suit jacket cape and Flock of Seagulls hair and that naturally-the-color-of-a-cherry-popsicle mouth and leather motorcycle gloves, and Pete is _not prepared_.

The sound of Patrick Stump singing unlocks Pete like a key every time he hears it, but especially this time. This time, Pete changes all at once, internal tumblers he didn’t know were out of alignment sliding back into place, a ribcage he didn’t know was split open clicking back together with a feeling like a sigh. It is not the first time he’s ever been aligned nor the first time he’s ever realized he has a heart, but he’s readier now than he was before. Pete is maybe _becoming_. Pete is maybe becoming something softer than a lock, something with more functions than keeping things constrained. Pete is maybe learning to allow himself. To open his own heart, and accept the love that is offered it.

Maybe.

Pete glamours his face so eyes will slide off it, forget him. If he’s not prepared to see Patrick, he figures he definitely can’t handle Patrick seeing _him_. Besides which he never quite forgets: anything might be watching. There’s no casual way to ask _hey man find any dead birds in your bed lately?_ of someone you’ve not spoken to in a year. So Pete’s not taking any extra chances.

The show is incredible. Patrick’s voice, Patrick’s dance moves, Patrick playing a trumpet, Patrick’s physical transformation, the way he has remade himself—Pete remembers when he could barely get this kid to stand at the front of a stage in a mostly-empty room. Pete remembers when they made a spit-sealed oath that Pete would become the frontman even as Patrick’s mouth overflowed with Pete’s words.

Onstage, Patrick hitches his hips obscenely, sweating and pinkly mouthing out, _Cause I’m a cheat, cheat, cheat and baby bang bang, kiss kiss, you and I got to put an end to this_. It would hurt, Pete knows it would hurt, if he was any less electrified by the sight of Patrick again, after all this time. It would hurt if it was any less true.

Pete is so lost in it—this tiny room throbbing with Patrick, the pressing heat of bodies, the sound the sound, like a tide come in to drown every ache inside him—Patrick singing _cross my heart, cross my fingers_ like the best spell Pete’s ever heard, the tight coil of confidence and sensuality spilling out of Patrick hip-first and spreading hot over the crowd, all of this what he was able to accomplish once he was out from under Pete’s curse, Pete’s dramatic shadow—

Pete is so lost in longing, admiration, and musical bliss that he doesn’t notice right away, when the booing starts. He doesn’t hear the first cry of derision, so he can’t collect the teeth of whatever asshole produced it. It’s not until the heckling has cropped up all around him that Pete even really starts to hear it.

It’s like the _Folie_ tour all over again, with the marked exception that Pete’s anonymous in the crowd this time. There’s no one up on the stage to be a shield, to draw the poison.

It has honestly never occurred to Pete before, that people would turn up to hate anybody but him. Patrick was right: he really is selfish. He thought all the scorn in the world belonged to him. He’s not convinced this scorn doesn’t.

He investigates.

Tracing the origin of one of the cries, Pete’s eyes catch on something strange. It tugs magnetic in his stomach, the not-quite-rightness. The air around the heckler seems to sizzle and haze.

Pete knows at once: it’s magic. He knew it. There’s a faerie here, in the crowd, and better disguised than he is. Pete must know its purpose for being here. He begins cutting through the crowd, taking care to weave and meander towards the pulse of glamour that draws him like an arrow. The fae will feel the heat of his intent and evade him if he moves straight on.

As he follows the pull, Patrick continues to perform and the crowd continues to sway listlessly. Heckling voices rise all around him, but Pete never seems to draw nearer to their owners. He’s so busy keeping his eyes trained on that one oil-slick signature of magic that it takes him some time to realize it’s all around him. The glamour on his own skin begins to prickle and hum, a feeling like today’s drugstore dose is wearing off; it’s not until his skin begins to burn like raw iron’s on it that he finally broadens his gaze and notices thick, steamy swaths of magic warping the air all around him.

Pete wouldn’t put off this much power if he was a nuclear missile. Either half this venue is packed with fae or there’s just one or two scary-strong ones. Pete clenches the muscles of his jaw so hard his teeth ache, tendons all through his body popping with tension. Magic galvanizes golden around his knotted fists as, without his permission, his drug-numbed body prepares to fight.

(Sometimes, if you’ve been in enough of them, your synapses stumble over the idea of _not_ being in a fight. Disoriented, they’re eager for anything that feels familiar to them. It is bloodlust on a molecular level, battle by rote. Pete hasn’t actually wanted to fight in a long time. It’s something his body just… does for him.)

Pete feels the atmosphere crunching up around him, turning brittle, preparing to be broken and hurled. The concertgoers around him feel it too: soon there is a textured little bubble around him, a bristling space people subconsciously shift to stay out of.

Pete locks eyes with the fae he’s been tracking, his original target, and thinks about making war.

The problem is, it’s just some Latinx kid in a flannel with smudges around their eyes that are either eyeliner or sleepless nights or both. Their gelled pompadour wilts with the humidity of the pit. Pete knows the kid stinks of fae even from across the room, but fae _love_ music. If it’s Pete’s mission to punch out every elf. hobgoblin, and imp who attends a concert, he really _will_ be starting a war, and for what? Might as well start by blacking his own eyes, ‘cause here he stands, drawn in by the light, the life, the music—the magic of Patrick’s voice.

If he really slows himself down and thinks about it, Pete can’t even be sure if the kid’s actually a fae or just under a glamour. Not everything that he disagrees with is magic and malice. It is possible— _possible_ —that Patrick is being booed, that Fall Out Boy’s last tour was booed, because people do not always appreciate art. That people will even buy concert tickets in order to express their distaste through public abuse. Not everything that happens to Pete happens because he is a changeling. It is not always arcane bullshit; sometimes it’s just regular bullshit.

So Pete stands down. He doesn’t pull his sword out of Faerie and into his clenched fist. He pushes to the front of the stage instead, trusting his own glamour to hide his face, and leans in towards Patrick, the sweat-spotted stage. Pete pours himself into the music and lets all the rest go.

*

At the second show it happens again.

And the third.

Choking thick magic in the air, insults and boos that have no identifiable source until they’re picked up and carried by the humans in the crowd, a handful of scattered fae kids with weak glamour signatures and glazed golden eyes that hold all the malevolence of glazed golden donuts. (Pete feels he deserves a credit for not cutting any of them in half. The heckling humans, that is. He tries to remind himself he has done far more harm to Patrick than any of these honeysuckle and gingko motherfuckers are doing now.)

By the fourth show, Pete is staking out the club hours in advance, the self-appointed guard dog against fae interference. He listens to Patrick’s songs in his earbuds, skulking around the side entrance, sending probes of glamour snaking under the door, feeling for ill will other than his own.

In the sixth city, Pete catches a phouka in the act. Phoukas, dark and mischievous, are more interested in hijinks and cheerful marauding than malevolence and ill will, in Pete’s experiences. They’re obnoxious, disruptive, sure—but not sinister.

Not usually.

This one, wearing the aspect of a human, has flickers of goat ears and plumed dog’s tail around it. the magic coming off it is so strong and empathic it seems to throb in Pete’s field of vision. Pete feels unrest and dissatisfaction pluck at him like he’s a string; it vibrates through him, resonating, _spreading_. If the phouka voiced a grumble, Pete would answer with a shout. He feels rubbed raw and doused in kerosene.

It’s a clever piece of magic. A fae quality that becomes ever more apparent is a failure of basic empathy. Because they do not fully understand or consider important the short lives of humans, it is often the case that they never make the attempt. This phouka’s grating aura illustrates what a boon that really is: much wickedness can be wrought with human feelings, thinks Pete. He almost, but not quite, includes himself in that designation.

“What are you doing?” Pete asks, approaching the dark-skinned, twist-haired phouka. He takes care to level his voice. The atmospheric antagonism urges him to yell instead. Curiously, the effect grows no stronger the closer he draws to the phouka. A clever spell indeed—no wonder he couldn’t track it. He feels the same twitching, itching restlessness he’s felt each night at Patrick’s shows, only instead of being distilled across 80 audience members, it’s all landing on him. It is not a titrated dose. The tide entire is just for him.

“If the look on your face is an indication? Trashing your love.” The phouka speaks easily, with a grin that suggests this selfsame rougish charm has resolved most of their problems so far and will probably resolve this one too. Pete can’t tell if their South London accent is genuine or affectation. He decides it’s aggravating either way.

“Lighten up, boyo,” says the phouka, winking an outrageously blue eye. “We all need a bit of fun.”

Pete’s fists are clenched so hard his fingernails pierce his palms. He’s all but vibrating with antagonistic energy. Pete—Pete doesn’t solve his problems with a grin. He solves them with a sword.

“Who put you up to this.” Pete is barely able to bite out the words. His skin is so tight with kinetic energy, with the raw potential of violence, that he feels it could burst. What is the tensile strength of a glamour? How much more magic can this one absorb before it starts… spilling back out again?

The phouka raises their palms in an unconvincing gesture of innocence. “You’re the one skulking about!” they protest. “I’m just here for the show. Any trouble that might unfold is just a… bonus.”

Pete’s hands are full of the phouka’s collar and he’s got them pinned against the dirty alley wall before Pete’s even thought. He bows back a fist, holds it cocked and quivering not twelve inches from the phouka’s nose.

“Has it been you? Have you been following the tour and fucking it up?”

“Racist,” the phouka says softly. They don’t sound threatened at all. “Just because you catch a whiff of empathic magic, it’s got to be me? All phouka are the same to you, is that it?”

Pete’s annoyance is so huge it blots out all other thought, all other awareness. Aggression swims over his skin. Later, he will be impressed with himself for holding back for so long. To whatever extent that slamming a stranger up against an alley wall counts as holding back.

“ _Just tell me why you’re doing this_.” Pete can’t tell if he’s making a threat or a plea.

The phouka gives him a pitying look. “Because it’s something to do. How young _are_ you? Don’t you ever get bored? It was a better offer than none at all. Sounded like a lark. I didn’t ask questions.”

Somehow, with the magic pouring over him and his veins throbbing so hard he feels like he can’t breathe, Pete lets go of their coat and takes a drunken stumble backwards. Every cell, every molecule screaming _fightfightfightfight_ and Pete lets go. Pete steps away.

Pete is breathing very, very hard. Pete is shaking like a very shaky thing. Pete says, “So it wasn’t you. The other nights, that wasn’t you?”

“Wasn’t,” says the phouka. “But it would’ve been, had anyone asked. Don’t take it so personal, mate. I’m unsworn, see? No honor, no allegiance.” The phouka shows their teeth in another winning grin. “Tell you a secret, though. I did get something special for this gig.” They pluck the shoulders of their jacket, sprucing it with swagger. “Your glamour would’ve split fist-first if you’d struck me.”

It is hard to let any of this settle with the itch in the air and Pete’s panic thickening his lungs. What kind of trap, what kind of sabotage, what kind of fucking scheme is Eloissine enacting now? Nothing is safe, nowhere is safe, no one can be trusted—!

“Was I meant to?”

The phouka shrugs. “I keep trying to tell you. I haven’t got an agenda. Not getting paid enough to ask questions. You finished blustering yet? If we aren’t going to fight, posturing’s rather dull, yeah?”

With a barreling freight train of neurochemistry bearing down upon him, with an angry swarm of magic gnawing at his fried, nightmared nerves, Pete does the unthinkable. Pete takes another step back. He holds his palms out, mirroring the phouka’s earlier gesture.

“I’m finished,” he says. “You find me tonight if there’s something else you think you want to say.”

And somehow, _somehow_ , Pete turns his back on that bristling aura of war. Pete leaves the phouka of questionable character to instill hostility at Patrick’s show. Pete walks away without punching anything at all.

In other words, Pete does something new. Pete makes a choice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love this story and I love all of you and this is something kind, I hope, after what I've been doing to you these last few weeks.
> 
> Next: I'M NOT SAYING BUT YOU WILL LOVE IT


	18. May The Bridges That I've Burned Light My Way Back Home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YOU HAVE ALL BEEN SO BEAUTIFUL AND SO PATIENT, HERE IS WHAT WE HAVE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR

After he does not punch, slice, or dismember the phouka (for which he is quite prepared to accept accolades), Pete loses himself in Central Park. It is early autumn, sun bright enough to warm his skin and air cool enough for jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie. The smell of just-turned leaves reminds him of fresh starts and new beginnings, though he does not know why. It’s been a long time since he was showing up in pressed clothes with fresh carefully labeled school supplies for September starts to new, numbered years.

He is looking for a particular leaf, a just-perfect one, that he can use to scry home and see Bronx. He’s gotten a lot better, a lot finer-tuned, at his own magic as he’s perfected the drams to drown Eloissine’s. He wonders if it will be sharper, spikier in New York after so many months of floating among the glittering soap-bubble magic of Los Angeles, chewing South Side twigs and seasoning his meals with West Suburbs dirt.

Just when he least expects it, a figure materializes next to the path so abruptly it takes a moment to realize they’ve only stepped out from the camouflaging trunk of a tree. The creature, dappled in shades of downy brown, is in Pete’s path before he’s even reacted.

A moment after Pete’s eyes register the young, androgynous person before him, the scent of the sea crashes over him like a physical wave. Then he knows what they are: a selkie. They tug the sleeves of their bulky cabled sweater down, ball the cuffs in their fists. The gesture is so vulnerable that Pete finds himself instantly remembering all the times he’s felt fraudulent, a tin penny, in this skin-not-his. He wonders where the selkie’s real skin is. It’s probably rude to ask.

“Lady Momue bids welcome to Chicago’s errant knight.” The selkie speaks in a voice light and insubstantial as surf.

“Wilmette’s,” Pete corrects automatically. He’s pretty sure Chicago courtiers deal with an order of magnitude less bullshit.

The selkie blinks at him with large pale eyes.

“It is my lady’s hope that you will be amenable to parley,” they say. “You know, of course, that you are being watched?”

Pete flinches at the words like they’re a physical blow. He spins around, scanning, but the park is huge. Eyes could be anywhere. His palm itches, longing for the sword.

The selkie’s laughter bubbles like a merry stream. “It’s here,” she says, plucking at the empty air around Pete’s head. “A hex—not a watcher. Can’t you feel it prickling?”

 _No_ , Pete doesn’t say. _I’ve been too high. I’ve been on the run._ Everything _needles. Every moment burns._

No: Pete has not noticed any hex. He’s been too busy scanning for ravens, for hobs with handfuls of teeth.

“You can’t come into Momue’s halls with a spy upon you,” says the selkie. They look dubious about Pete’s usefulness to their lady, given that he’s missed this—either he’s incompetent, or he’s a willing spy. Like it’s a trick question, they ask, “May I remove it?”

Pete has heard of Momue: a moss-haired rusalka, Seelie Queen of Manhattan, with her palace sunk in the muddy Hudson. He has no idea why she would want to meet him, but he’s sure it’s nothing good. It never is.

He’s also sure he doesn’t want a spy hex on him. “As you wish,” he says coolly, taking care not to let her think she’s doing him a favor. Creating a debt is a diplomacy tool he’s used often. He’s wise enough to avoid at least this one thing.

The selkie fills their mouth from a flask at their hip and, without warning, spits saltwater into Pete’s face.

He blinks at them, dripping. His eyes sting. He’s not sure why he’s surprised. This is how Patrick felt, probably, after Pete spat in his eye. Instead of clear sight, Pete experiences a clear head. Some of the tension, the jangling paranoia, softens and melts. His breath loosens, a raggedness so old he’s stopped noticing it smoothing out. The sense that malice is leering over his shoulder, just out of sight, does not vanish—too clearly he remembers the bird in Patrick’s bed, the disembodied whispers around Bronx’s crib—but it does ease, become less urgent.

He bites his lips before his sudden gratitude can escape them. Thanks have power. Thanks create debts.

“Very well,” says the selkie. “My Lady awaits.”

Pete follows the selkie into a stream that runs through the park. He kneels, sense of unease twitching down his back, in its flow. Stones slip beneath his knees. The selkie lays a chill hand on the back of his neck and presses his face down, gentle as a first kiss, into the few running inches of cold water. They push his mouth and nose and brow into the silt and grit.

Pete holds his breath as long as he is able. His eyes swim red as air runs out. His fingers itch with magic, with violence, with his war. At last, he exhales. He submits. Under the insistent weight of the selkie’s grip, he parts his lips. He breathes in.

All the way to Momue’s throne room, he drowns.

*

The rusalka queen lolls, decadent and nude, on a wide throne of living coral. Her forehead is crowned with bright pink scars. Her long green hair rises from her head, undulating in the lift of the river.

Pete’s sneakers fill swiftly with river muck. It is someone else’s magic trick that allows him to breathe. Pete doesn’t know whose. Water pushes all against his face, mouth, eyes. The message is clear: your life is a gift we give you, one lungful at a time. Be polite.

Pete has never made a very good courtier, but maybe it’s been an issue of motivation. He wants Bronx to have more than a waterlogged corpse for a dad, so he does that which has never come naturally and bows to the Queen and Court assembled before him. Waxy river plants tangle around his knees.

“Well met, Peter Wentz,” says Momue, her voice traveling through water in a sweet, surrounding manner that shares nothing with the way sound travels through air. “Come, princeling, and sit beside me.”

She shifts on her throne, beatifically unperturbed by her nakedness. Pete’s own clothes tug and billow uncomfortably as he moves through the water. Pete is on the throne before he realizes she’s glamoured him. He’s never sat upon a throne before, and it is a poisonous breach of protocol for him to do so now. Momue shows him mossy teeth, her fingers fiddling absently with her pearlescent comb.

“I’m a lot of things,” Pete blurts unwisely, “but not a prince. Your honor is misplaced. Let me return to my own Court and send a more worthy emissary.”

“It does not know its own blood,” Momue says, mottled lips curling with amusement. “ _Poor_ creature.” Her voice slides over him like honey, thick in the water. Her flesh feels soggy and too-soft where she brushes his cheek. Pete would recoil from the touch if he did not find it so _pleasant_. Well-being emanates out from the point of contact. Being near Seelie fae is like a long, continuous sigh of pleasure. Pete fucked a Seelie, once, before he ever even knew what a Patrick was. It was like being dipped in candle wax, sear fading fast to wholesome warmth, mesmerizing blisters leaving memories in tender skin.

Pete is rapidly losing control of this whole situation.

Pete fills his head with nothing but a look of pain on Patrick’s face, Patrick’s voice hissing out, “Fuck you.” It is the most sobering memory he has. He lams his own glamour tight around himself, a steel wall of someone else’s face wrapped around his faulty heart. Pete is tired of a lot of things, but most of all he’s tired of being some fucking faerie’s pawn.

“I know blood,” Pete says, wrenching away from Momue’s slippery touch at last. “Mine is impatient. Come to the point, sea witch, or let me go.”

Momue’s face darkens with displeasure. Pete would wager she is unaccustomed to having her glamour shaken off.

“I have daughters. They want for kingdoms, and my lands are small. I thought to make a gift of you. Let me give you to my eldest daughter, and I will give you soldiers enough to take your rightful throne.”

“I am not a prince!” The words tear out of Pete with force enough to shred. Today he has been so good, so calm, so controlled—but now his blood is hammering in his ears, his sword hilt is briny in his hand, he is standing on shaking legs in the river muck and he is _screaming_ , he is wrought of _rage._

“Oh, Peter. Is there nothing you remember?” Momue’s voice cloys the water around them, choking thick. The sight of Patrick shimmers and gluts in his mind’s eye. His sword is falling from his grip. The world is swirling into nothing and Pete is going with it…

Pete _remembers_.

Pete remembers his mother. Pete remembers skin like fresh-fall snow, kissed with hot blisters that recall dark armor. Pete remembers nettle-like close-shorn hair, glowing copper eyes, a curling mouth like a plum, yellow on the inner edge and revealing fine silver teeth. Pete remembers a wicked laugh and how it warmed him, his child’s body, to absorb her delight. Pete remembers a crown twisted together of peeled bark, bark like his own true skin.

Pete remembers a throne—a throne he has only ever seen one woman upon. Pete remembers her face looking down at him, blank of expression, eyes liquid with far-off curiosity. Pete remembers an icy finger on his brown, a tingling glamor slipping cool down his face.

He remembers going still.

Pete’s memories stop there.

His eyes flicker open, weak candles in an uncertain wind. His voice comes out hoarse, long unused. “How can you know this?”

Momue splits her lips again, bestowing upon him her lichen smile. “Your father came up in one of my own forests. I knew him well, before _she_ saw him killed.”

There is a limit to what Pete’s mind can deal with—to what he can process and respond to. He’s very young, for a faerie, and not so old for a human either. This is too much.

“So what say you, princeling? Will you aid me? Will you make our causes one?” After a moment of Pete’s silence, she adds with a leer, “My daughters are very beautiful. You needn’t go with the oldest if you prefer another.”

“I am not _yours_.” Pete speaks slowly, deliberately. For once he has thought and chosen words with care, more like the way he writes than his usual reckless, scattershot speech. “I am my own.”

“You have spent too long among humans, if lies fall off your tongue so easily!” Momue’s leer is vanished, replaced by sudden, total fury. “Die, then, alongside the mortals you’re so enamored of. Remember whose help you’ve spurned, when your vile Lady bids you take up sword against them, when drunk of her magic you run them through!”

Pete opens his mouth to speak and the river rushes in. He chokes, goes blind in the sudden muddy whirlpool, struggles—and goes still.

Just like in his memory.

*

Pete wakes wet and alone in Central Park. Still, wake he does, and that is something.

 _I am my own_ , he’d said, and he’d been able to speak the words. Is he finally human enough to lie? Or could it be… true?

Pete is not too cautious to cast a red-edged maple leaf into the stream and summon Nassara by name. “Why are faeries following P—him?”

Pete comes close, very close, to saying the name. If the spy hex is truly broken, does that mean he is he free to say what he really means? Or is the entire world a giant, eager ear?

“Why are you one of them?” Nassara asks back. There is a sound of wet, jointy chewing. Her image does not materialize in the stream, only her voice. Pete is suspicious of speaking blind. Anyone would be with her, listening. It is good he did not say the name.

As for her question, there is not one true thing it is safe to speak aloud. Why is it Pete never realizes until it’s too late that he’s been careless? He’s always giving himself away, always spilling his lowest secrets like a handful of guts at the feet of surprised villains, at feet that never expected to be his confidant but are all too happy to use his weakness against him.

Pete stamps an already sodden sneaker into the center of his scrying, dashing the connection. Suddenly New York feels large and menacing. Pete longs for the palms that remind him of nothing.

He does not risk another leaf, not even for a moment’s sight of his son. He’s already given enough away. He won’t hand every last thing he’s ever cared about off into the menacing darkness, at least not today.

*

For the next six months, Pete’s only job is climbing out of the hole he’s dug himself into. He stops taking meds, in a careful way this time, titrating his dose down a day at a time, bleeding it out of his blood with control and deliberation. He learns to cope with panic attacks unaided, without a sword in his hand, to tolerate his lows without either battle or quiet, private bladed edges. He becomes accustomed to unmedicated fear, to unsoothed nightmares, to constant vigilance.

The less he runs from it, the softer it becomes. It is a toothy thing, and clawed; but it seems to rip his flesh less deeply, to hook his heart less wholly, as the time goes on. He does not become the master of it so much as its companion: Pete and his worst fears learn to coexist, to live without conflict side by side.

He throws himself into raising Bronx, into being a man his son will feel proud of one day. He keeps the good parts of himself, the principles, the bravery, the desire to stand up for what is right and good, and overhauls the rest.

Pete practices making choices.

When he reads Patrick’s online journal entry, the one where he swears off music forever as a result of the abuses he’s taken, the abuses Pete did not use violence to forestall, Pete still does not feel ready. But maybe this is the kind of thing you never feel ready for.

Pete calls Patrick. He is surprised when Patrick picks up.

Then Patrick answers with, “I wondered when you’d call,” and it goes way beyond _surprised_.

Pete’s carefully planned speech is totally forgotten, blown out of his head by the constant atom bomb that is Patrick. Once again, Pete has failed to account for the effect this kid’s voice has on him.

“You know me better than I do, then.” It is such an awkwardly intimate opening line. Pete immediately regrets it. All of this is already completely _off script_.

“I saw you,” Patrick says. “At my shows. Only you were… different. You didn’t _look_ like you. I don’t know how to explain it,” he adds, frustration coiling through his tone. “I see a lot of things I can’t explain. I get the feeling that’s your fault, somehow.”

“Add it to the list,” Pete says bleakly.

“Sometimes when I look at you, you’re not… _you_. I think I see… something impossible.”

“I read what you wrote,” Pete says, because he doesn’t know how to respond to Patrick’s confession. He feels the fist squeeze in his throat, the plummet in his gut, the sudden throbbing in his chest that informs him _we’re definitely dying this time, this is certainly the end_. What Patrick’s saying makes the whole world feel desperately unsafe. Pete forces himself to stop gulping air and take a slow, controlled breath. One and then another.

“Yeah,” says Patrick, accepting the diversion. His voice is quiet and empty and flat. As usual, Pete finds he liked the frustration better. Pete resists the urge to piss him off, just to give him something else to feel.

“It made me think—we need each other right now.”

“Who’s better at being hated than Pete Wentz?”

“Exactly.” Pete’s face cracks into a smile, because there is happiness even on this fraught ground. Lavender and lily, he’s missed Patrick. “I’m uniquely qualified to relate. And…” Pete, determined to make choices, wants to be honest. He’s been practicing. He doesn’t want to hide or evade or conceal. He wants to strip the glamour off it all and let Patrick really _see_ him, maybe for the first time and maybe just admitting what Patrick’s seen already.

He starts like this: “I miss you so much. I don’t know how we ever got a point where my kid doesn’t even know you, the most important person in my entire adult life. We conquered the world together once. Patrick, I want it back.”

“It can’t ever be how it was.” Patrick answers so fast it breaks Pete’s heart. (Yes. Yes. He has a heart, okay? He’s fucking got one.) But Pete doesn’t disagree. He wants Patrick without the poison, without the panic, without all the pain.

“I know. And that’s a good thing. I’m asking… you’re my best friend, Rickster. I just want to see you.”

“Innocent as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, is that it?” But there is a pause this time, between Pete’s words and Patrick’s, and the pause is holds a cautious glow of barely-remembered warmth.

Emboldened, Pete says, “What if I happened to be passing through Chicago? Would you meet me for dinner, a street hot dog, anything?”

“Of course,” says Patrick.

Pete is so suddenly, forcefully happy that flowers s tart blooming between the planks of his hardwood floor, twining gleefully around his feet. He tries to stop them—they’ll ruin the floor—but he can’t stop grinning. His magic has been so much stronger, since he’s been sober. Since he admitted he had this fucking heart. Since he decided he was his own. Since he started making choices.

(It’s not always flowers. He caught his bedding on fire last week, during a nightmare. There’s always a downside. That’s the basic rule of a changeling’s life. That’s the only way magic, real magic, can work.)

“I think I write a Fall Out Boy song,” Patrick says next. That’s it—the floor is toast. Exuberant, the flowers proliferate. A thorny rose bush entangles Pete’s legs, tearing his jeans; four-foot sunflowers erupt violently from the floor, throwing splinters. Pete’s not even mad. Pete’s laughing.

“I’m not trying to make it weird,” Patrick goes on, sounding pained. “I mean, I don’t want to be presumptuous. Shit. I don’t know why I even said it. It’s just a scrap, not even a song, and I—”

Laughter makes Pete’s voice soft. “Patrick,” he says, because he thinks it’s important, “I feel so happy.”

*

Time speeds up.

Pete gets a hotel room in Chicago, not comfortable with the debt and potential pitfalls associated with staying in Patrick’s home. It’s a moot point: they end up staying up all night in Pete’s hotel room, side by side on the king bed, passing Pete’s notebook and Patrick’s laptop back and forth, playing with this song Patrick’s written, with what their band would have to become in order to rise from the ashes. From time to time, the lines of their legs touch. It’s enough.

Pete goes back to LA glowing like he’s swallowed the sun. He believes this feeling is named _hope_.

Patrick makes the first calls to Andy and Joe. Pete’s the only one who blew himself up and burned all his bridges, but it turns out the others haven’t done especially well either. Andy sunk into a depression deep enough that he came out again with near-perfect understanding of Pete Wentz, which is not a condition Pete would wish on anyone; Joe has grown brittle and guarded, paranoid of being taken advantage of or ignored.

Once Patrick has laid the groundwork, Pete spends hours on the phone with each of them, finally leaving enough space for them to voice all the issues and concerns Pete used to speak over. He listens, he apologizes, and in very few words he explains himself: “I wasn’t me. I wasn’t okay. The way I acted was fucked up. I’m learning to be different.”

He makes repairs.

Then they’re all face-to-face in their manager’s living room, laughing and arguing and negotiating what a reunion might look like, what version of their band might be able to survive. They agree just to try it: if it isn’t fun, if it doesn’t work, if it isn’t different, they’ll walk away.

They go into the studio and they make something new. It feels incredible.

It sounds even better.

The band is back together again.

It’s a miracle.

One day, after hours of exhausting, punishing, amazing recording, during which Patrick hit notes he’s never hit before, Pete grins at his best friend and says, “I told you you were magic. Are you sure you’re not a faerie?”

Patrick asks, “Are you sure it isn’t you?”

It’s a miracle, and Pete is too busy to even notice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: but you didn't think the angst was over. Did you? Next: I die in my daydreams.
> 
> Also keep your lovely eyes peeled for a smutty holiday gift. (The ribbons on my fic say do not open before Christmas. :D ) I love your patience and your devotion and your kindness and please, tell me what you think!


	19. You Are The Dreamer, We Are The Dream

Pete ignores the first few messages. He’s busy, after all: the work of secret reunions, rebranding, _rebanding_ , and writing pop-sampled, blood-pumping, wholehearted wildfire is highly absorbing. He’s never felt like this before, even at their best. He’s never had a heart before, not one that he saw and tended to and worked in concert with. This way feels so much happier, so much more whole. He looks back on his own self with a gut-punching pity. It is an exercise in the surreal, like inhabiting a Dali painting, to imagine himself back there. To part the veil of Klonopin and inhabit that far-off, empty-chested, sad-eyed boy of rustling limbs and bled-out ambition.

Pete is glad he doesn’t have to.

So if he overlooks a handful of feathery fern leaves on his pillow and simply sweeps bloody piles of cat teeth off his front steps before the guys, who have been piled into his place, filling guest rooms and couches with their light and heat and sound, things a kid who came up in cramped, smelly vans and shared hotel rooms had no idea how much he had been missing, can see—if Pete steps over omens whittled into branches and bones, scoops dead birds out of his kitchen sink with dishwashing gloves and puts them out with the trash, and wakes from not-quite-dreams spitting out handfuls of cloudy river pearls and tooth-chipping topazes with cheery indifference—

If Pete ignores every attempt his old world makes to reach him in his new one, well, he’s been busy. Who can really blame him?

When the traditional means of contact have all been tapped out, when Pete is stubbornly, safely living in California, recording in Santa Monica, and sidestepping every reminder of the knight he used to be, Fae loses its patience. The image of Nassara appears one morning in Pete’s coffee cup. He chokes, runs to the sink, and spits out a throat-tearing mouthful of coffee and cream. For good measure, he pours the contents of his cup after it, Nassara’s cursing voice made tinny by its smallness as it swirls down the drain.

Patrick, who sits at the dining table eating toaster pastries with Bronx, a tableaux that fills Pete with an overwhelming sense of _family_ , raises an eyebrow at him. They both know Patrick has witnessed weirder displays.

“I should probably cut back on caffeine,” Pete says, dropping one of his patented True-but-Unrelated Pete Facts.

In spite all of these increasingly obvious portents, missives, and flashing neon signs, Pete manages to be caught completely off guard when he’s ducking out the back door of a Starbucks with a tray full of drinks for the band and a gauntleted fist slams him back into a wall. Caramel macchiato and whipped cream erupt dramatically, flying through the air like slow-motion fireworks before they rain down in a sticky spatter all over Pete and the tree-trunk armor of his assailant.

It’s not Nassara. All at once Pete wishes he’d taken the message from her when he’d gotten the chance. Chance _s_. This person, this faerie who has come to deliver the message, is one of Eloissine’s newer knights—one Pete does not recognize. Pete’s been away for a long time. The faerie wears the aspect of youth, with sallow ochre skin like he’s been rolling in dandelions and tangled algae-green hair hanging long from the half of his head that is not shaved. His eyes roll, rubies in a preternaturally sharp skull. His teeth are jagged and stick up at odd angles, like the glass left in a broken windowpane. His breath smells like carrion. He has not bothered to clean the gore out of his armor in some time. In his resplendent horror, his nightmare madness, he is everything Pete almost was.

For an instant, Pete wonders what would have happened to him, if he had been raised not as a changeling but as a child of the Unseelie Court. The scarred-up, shiny-skinned, split-tongued emissary before him is an eerie approximation of the life that could have been.

It has never occurred to Pete before that, in many ways, he is lucky.

Pete gives up on the coffee and flings the tray into the faerie’s face. The knight releases Pete’s shoulder to bat away the incoming faceful of hot and iced coffees. Falling liquid scalds them both. The knight lunges for him again, but this time Pete is ready. He uses his empty hands to throw up a barrier, a tightly woven band of glamour that wends around the knight’s arms, holding them against his sides. He gnashes his teeth a bare inch from Pete’s nose. Pete steps sideways, out of range of the knight’s gingivitis.

It is not a particularly Unseelie type of magic, these specific, nonviolent restraints. No one ever taught Pete this. He’s been figuring some things out on his own, now that he’s his own. This means Eloissine’s faerie has no idea how to break it, how to get out of it. The thing about killing machines is that if you take the knives out of their hands and the punch out of their arms, you’ve robbed them of their only way to operate. Once violence is removed as an option, they are quite helpless. Pete knows this. He’s been one.

“You are _very_ far from home,” Pete says. His hands, empty of coffee and swords alike, keep firm hold of the magic streaming into his invisible bonds. They are a gentle configuration of power, easily slipping the brutal slams of resistance thrown out by his thrashing, gnashing assailant. Pete keeps the bonds tight, flexing around the faerie knight to keep him mindful of his disadvantage.

“Aye, and if you were any less difficult to reach, I’d not have to be!” the faerie spits. “The sun and the salt out here—it makes me ill. Don’t know how you stand it. We’re forests, fields, frost. We’re midwinter. You, too, are far from home. Now release me, brother, before you make me mad.”

“I am less concerned about _your_ feelings than you might imagine,” says Pete. His voice is mild, though his skin is shivering and stamping with magic. To all the world they look like two men (one of whom is dressed rather strangely, but then again, it’s California) in an alley in a heated conversation, standing a foot apart with their bodies canted intensely towards one another. Pete is new to nonviolence, but he feels that keeping his temper level is key. “The reason I’m so far from home is to avoid visits just like this one. Nothing more annoying than family that drops by too often. No respect for boundaries. I’ve made my stance on this quite clear, over the years. So it begs the question of what. The _fuck_. You’re doing here.”

The faerie’s mad eyes roll as he shows his mad teeth in a mad grin. All of this would be much more chilling if his jaundiced face wasn’t dotted with whipped cream. “You’ve been on the run from your oath for long enough,” says the knight. “She bids you remember you’re hers, and return to Court to bend the knee and wait upon your Lady’s pleasure. Before she decides to take something that’s yours to remind you. You haven’t been returning her calls, Peter Wentz. You injure her with your disregard.”

“Good to know,” grunts Pete. The strain of holding the restraints in place while holding his temper in check is mounting. He has a pretty good idea that the knight is riling him on purpose, chipping away at his control with insults and thin threats, but damned if it isn’t working anyway. “Great catching up. Let’s get together at the next Unseelie picnic. Now if that’s all…”

The faerie snaps his teeth again, cackling up into the sky above with relish. He shows Pete his grey-veined throat, crosshatched with purple scars Pete does not wish to learn the making of. The words he says next would have been life-changing, once:

“Don’t you know you’ve worked a miracle? Come home, little prodigal, and receive your final task at your gracious Lady’s feet. Or have you lost your taste for freedom?”

_A miracle_. Finally he’s worked a wonder that pleases Eloissine, that amuses her adequately to issue her next impossible task. Eight years, it’s been. Eight years of not-quite-miracles.

Eight years to learn that his freedom isn’t something anyone else can give. Eight years to learn his freedom was only ever _his_.

Eight years to learn that oaths and ownership are not one thing.

Eight years for a heart to stop and start, for a band to live and die and rise again. Eight years to kiss Patrick, to grab hold of him only for him to slip through Pete’s fingers every time. Eight years to die again and again only to keep on living. Eight years to realize what he’s living for.

Eight years to grow up.

“I’m tired of playing fairy tale,” Pete says. “LA is close enough to Never-Neverland for me, and I _want_ to see my son grow up. I don’t want another task. I already have everything I need.”

“You’d have me tell our Lady _that_?” The knight looks eager, excited at the prospect. Pete knows he’s imagining wrath, tidal waves of blood, Eloissine on the warpath. Pete, having lived all that, has no need to imagine.

Pete drops the restraints without fanfare, without a fight. He shrugs. “Tell her whatever you want.”

He half-expects an axe to land in his back as he turns it on the wild knight and strides, with what he hopes looks like courage and not shaking hands and watery knees, out of the alley and back into Starbucks to take a second run at this whole coffee delivery thing.

But no axe comes.

What’s that, Pete thinks, if not _happy ever after_?

*

The situation is this: they are in the frozen woods before sunrise, setting their history symbolically ablaze as they pose for photographs that will announce their future. They are tired, they have barely slept. Pete’s giddy and half-drunk on the potential of it all: the feeling of being a band again, belonging to something, the sense that he can use his wit without conscience to _create_ again, the feeling that for the first time he can do anything he can wish. It is very cold, except near the bonfire, where the smell of scorching vinyl and all their melted accomplishments makes him light-headed and woozy with fumes. He keeps stealing glances at Patrick. He can hardly believe they’re so near, that this is happening, that this is _real_.

The field they are in, it is not very far from Unseelie territory. Pete can feel the magic coming off the trees, thick as the vinyl fumes and just as dizzying. He hasn’t come this close to the Court in so long—he thinks it’s been something like a year, maybe longer. He’s gotten smarter. He’s gotten less eager to test himself, to let himself down. He takes fewer chances, these days. At long last, he’s learned caution.

He’s found ways to deal with Eloissine’s barbed voice, always rustling against his ears and skin like crisped autumn leaves, without poisoning the life out of himself. It’s tolerating it, mostly: waiting out the whispers without springing into action, just allowing the surge of panic to tire itself out, wrestling with his guts. Tolerating it when he must, and avoiding it whenever possible. These days, Pete treasures heartbeats and holds his feeble magic around himself life a shield. Whispers aimed at his secret second skin bounce off that barrier, turned aside before they pierce him. It isn’t much, this shield, but neither are thimbles; it takes only a tiny amount of metal, of mettle, to turn needles aside.

So he is stronger. Surer. Not Peter Pan anymore, but someone beginning to resemble a grown-up. He’s more at risk too, without the old poisonous protections, the toxic tonics, the mercurial hole where a heart should be. There are more vulnerabilities when you care about things, when you really feel them, when you submit to the passage of time. In order to soften, a person has to let down his guard. In order to feel the people around him, a person has to cultivate an undefended openness.

This is a way in.

Tired, cold, elated, Pete’s breath fogs the sunrise-streaked winter field. He is warmed and sickened at once by the fire. Everything feels unreal, like a dream. Patrick’s cheeks and nose are red but even he can’t manage to look grumpy. They are all grinning, grinning at each other, even as their nose hairs freeze into icicles. Pete is humming happily to himself, thoughts all caught up in the songs they’ve been working on, occasionally tripping over the physical thrill of being near enough to Patrick to touch, even if he isn’t touching. He’s pleasantly distracted, breathing in the beauty that’s all around them, feeling something dangerously close to peace, and without really noticing he allows himself to idly follow a stray trail of footprints crusted into the snow.

Pete follows the trail, the kinetics keeping his flesh warm, and lets his eyes travel the early-morning frost of the bare tree branches, the etched beauty of winter he left behind with everything else when he moved his life to California. His thoughts ebb and flow with the melodies and meanings he and Patrick and Andy and Joe have been shyly, spectacularly, piecing together. Everyone is being very careful, very open, very respectful. Pete cannot describe what this feels like because he’s never felt it before. He likes it, though. He likes them being careful and… _kind_. Pete’s eyes take in the forest and his thoughts swim through half-formed songs and the whole dawn is suspended in unreality, a dream more than a morning. The footsteps unwind before him like the unbelievable journey that has been his life. He knows one day, he will have lived so long that it all will seem like it happened in the space of one breath, one moment. Pete is in no hurry to reach that day. For now, it feels golden and infinite, like a glass of light so close to spilling over that only surface tension holds them in. He knows when they burst it will be unlike anything he’s ever imagined. Better. Stronger. There is a magic in what they join together and do…

As Pete walks, he becomes aware of how tired he is. How little sleep he really got. The air is so biting, so cold, and sleep beckons like the promise of heat he can curl up inside. So warm, to close his eyes, just for a moment… _The lips you kiss are treacherous_ , the rustling trees try to warn him, but Pete isn’t listening to the trees. In his experience, trees don’t talk. His eyelids are so heavy. He’s not sure when he ended up on his knees. What’s the harm, what’s the danger, in allowing them to drift… closed?

Entirely without his permission, Pete has stopped walking. Pete has stopped waking.

Pete has started dreaming.

He dreams of Patrick.

_In Pete’s dream they fuck slowly, thoroughly, languorously, exploring every depth of pleasure available to them. There is no need to hurry. Patrick’s tongue travels Pete’s dick in languid strokes, his mouth obscene and shining, and Pete’s spine arches in a mirror of what he does on stage, thrusting his hips and bass skyward, the ley lines danced into the planks by Patrick powering him, filling him with sunlight and gold, pressing an entire shining forest of strength and wonder from the stage into Pete’s skeleton. Later, Pete covers Patrick’s body with small kisses, because secrets too precious to be spoken aloud can only be transmitted by tongue, licked into the skin. His mouth takes especial care to cover Patrick’s ivory thighs, to bite bruises into the imprints of his own fingertips. Together they stroke and suck and grind out a swollen chord, red as anything, the air around them throbbing so thickly the bed they roll on might as well be the chamber of a thundering heart. The whole world is violet, shadow, and gold, each breath a bursting constellation; they are suspended forever in the fraction just before release, Pete’s heart teeming with the pleasure of his orgasm and the ecstatic agony of tried, taut, trembling flesh just before it all_ gives _, explodes, collapses. There is no need to hurry. There is no need to stop. In Pete’s dream, they have lifetimes. There has never been magic realer than Patrick. Pete has never loved anyone more._

_Patrick’s hands tighten on Pete’s shoulders, Patrick’s name rising to Pete’s lips. They haven’t talked about this, but Pete somehow knows it’s safe to say, that Patrick is ready to hear it. Their bodies move together, the cosmos itself blazing with the pleasure they’re building, have built, will build, and Pete gasps aloud, “I love you, Patrick Stump.”_

_Their pace quickens, Pete’s hips bucking, chasing, chasing the melting point, but the world is slipping around him—_ changing _. At first Pete can’t say how or why, but soon he becomes aware that his own words are echoing, that the reverberations of his declaration, of Patrick’s name from his lips, are shuddering the fabric of their happiness into shreds. Blackness leaks through, the terrible dark. Pete’s skin begins to come off in Patrick’s hands, and Patrick recoils to see the rough burnished brown beneath it. Pete’s tattoos, a cautious keyhole and the brand_ Unlovable _, rip away at Patrick’s touch. Pete’s face slides off and he meets Patrick’s gaze with his eyes set in his real face for the first time, and Patrick’s face is made of horror. “What are you?” Patrick gasps, and his body shrinks away from Pete’s like a telescoping lens has zoomed out, his glistening nakedness shrouded in a grey and choking fog as he moves farther away. “What kind of monster? What have you done to Pete?”_

_Pete opens his mouth to say_ I am Pete _but his tongue trips over the words. Suddenly he can’t remember whether they’re a lie. He’s said them so many times before—why does he choke on them now?_ I’m not a monster _, he tries to say, but that won’t come out either. Instead of his own voice, Pete hears another._

_Thick and luxuriant as butter, greedy and yellow as an egg yolk, the smooth, self-satisfied voice says, “Do you still think you’re not mine? Bind them, Peter Wentz. Hand and foot, wrap them in ropes and drag them to my door. If they resist you, use whatever force is needed to subdue them. Your Joseph and Andrew and your dear, beloved Patrick—the one for whom you’d leave me. Bring them to me. Bring them alive enough to die and whole enough to suffer. We will have time for both, before you’re through.”_

_Pete looks around, frantic, but there is no longer any sight of Patrick. The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. The whole world is choking grey fog. His heart beats terror in his chest, a panting rabbit, a panicked deer. His breath comes so quick he cannot breathe it. Panic,_ panic _, worse than anything he’s ever taken pills for. This is it, this is the end, he’s really dying this time. He’s not breathing, there is_ no air _, he can’t see where the voice is coming from, he_ can’t _—_

_“Thank you,” says the voice, and the words sound so awkward and distasteful in the voice that he recognizes it at Eloissine’s at last. “You gave him to me so easily, in the end. Well, now that we’ve identified your distractions, we can get things back on track, can’t we? You are mine, body and name, oath and soul. Gather your friends. Bind them tight. Tell them nothing. And bring them to me. I compel you.”_

By the time Pete wakes—to Patrick’s frantic hands shaking his shoulders, Patrick’s far-off mouth filled with his name, to Patrick, Patrick, _why did he say Patrick_ —it is too late. It is Pete’s eyes that blink open, but it’s not Pete looking out of them. It’s Pete’s hand that shoots out and wraps around Patrick’s throat, but it’s not Pete doing the squeezing. Pete’s there, but he’s a hostage stashed in the backseat: he’s not the driver anymore.

Pete isn’t Pete’s anymore. He’s Eloissine’s now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a very brutal Christmas update, isn't it? Please read the smut I just posted to counteract it. 
> 
> THIS IS THE END, CATS AND KITTENS. The beginning of it, anyway. Thanks for hanging in so long and know that, at long last, your patience will be rewarded... 
> 
> Next: strange things about Pete Wentz.


	20. You Are My Favorite What If, You Are My Best I'll Never Know

When Pete drifts off into the frozen fucking woods during a 5-minute coffee break, it immediately sets a crawling edge to Patrick’s skin.

When it’s been 10 minutes and they’re all probably losing fingers and noses to frostbite, even huddled this close to the noxious fire and Pete’s _still_ not back, Patrick is certain. Something’s not right.

He’s been looking at Pete a little differently, this time around. Three times, Pete’s asked him if he’s a faerie. The first time, he’d thought Pete was an asshole. The second time he’d _known_ Pete was an asshole, and he hadn’t wanted to hear whatever came next—sometimes Patrick can just _tell_ when there are going to be ramifications, when Pete is going to come with consequences—so he’d swallowed anything Pete might have said with a scalding kiss, the kind that left them both with burns and saved nothing.

The third time was different. Patrick can’t say how or why, but it’s like somehow, the third time was like being struck with a Bible. It hit him like _truth_. He heard it in a way he can’t unhear.

It changed something.

Listen: Patrick has always been particularly good at deceiving himself when it comes to Pete. In many ways, it’s been an essential survival skill for their relationship.

Here are the facts, a list of Pete-phenomena Patrick has witnessed, been unable to explain, convinced himself to ignore, and not quite managed to forget:

  * The time they were unloading the van and Pete stumbled over a cord and _fell backwards_ _out of a van holding an 80 pound amp_ and, instead of breaking himself open and dying of a brain bleed, was rolled with perfect grace by the momentum of the fall and emerged utterly unscathed except for peculiar mesh burns on his hands, where they had touched the metal speaker covers
  * Literally every time they have ever shared a bed on tour and Patrick could not by any machination of physics or elbow-violence hold onto even a scrap of blanket, including the _numerous_ times Patrick has wrapped his entire body in the entire blanket like he’s a goddamn enchilada and within ten minutes, without even the slightest tug, even if Patrick stays awake and vigilant _the entire time_ , Pete has the entire blanket to himself again
  * Pete on an international flight, puking up leaves
  * Pete fresh off an international flight, _talking to a bird_ on the tarmac
  * Once Patrick went to Pete’s apartment in April, and Pete’s Christmas tree was still lush, green, and thriving, and Patrick had pointed it out like _hey, that’s incredibly unusual_ and Pete was all _I haven’t gotten around to taking it down yet_ and Patrick was like, _no that seems normal for you, I meant that it’s still alive_ and Pete, innocent as anything, asked _should it not be?_ and Patrick had said _you’re saying it doesn’t seem odd to you that this tree that was cut down six months ago is still perfectly fucking cheery and alive in your living room, and is that new growth on the end of this branch?_ and Pete had said _well, how long do yours usually live? You’ve got to give them_ water, _Patrick_
  * That sunset in LA that and how for a few days afterward, Pete looked different out of the corner of Patrick’s eye but never from straight on—Patrick kept catching flashes of burnished brown skin that were gone when he looked again
  * How handsome Pete’s stupid face is at literally all times
  * The way whenever they have a sound tech problem, they call Pete over and he passes his hands over the microphones and speakers and checks connections and with no noticeable intervention on his part the feedback is gone and the sound quality is magically perfect, and even the sound guys have no idea what he’s done
  * A follow-up: the time that this happened at a show in Kansas City and it wasn’t until they’d finished their entire performance without incident that Patrick realized his microphone pack wasn’t even _on_
  * Is it just Patrick or does one of their security guys sometimes have wings?
  * When they were in Japan and strangers and stray animals kept approaching Pete and whispering things to him or handing him things and then melting away into the crowd again. Not only did Pete fail to explain this satisfactorily, he often seemed downright alarmed that Patrick even noticed
  * Patrick swears he’s seen a tree branch reach out and slap Pete across the face before. Like, go out of its way and just _slap_ him
  * Relatedly: sometime flower petals fall off Pete when he’s happy. Where is he keeping them? Does he stuff his sleeves? Patrick has taken off Pete Wentz’s clothing more than once and no flower petals were discovered on any such occasions
  * The time Pete, in a fit of pique, said to Andy “I curse you to a lifetime of leaky ballpoint pens” and Andy had to switch to using pencils because ever since then he’s had a terrible track record of exploding pens
  * Pete’s not-at-all-sneaky weird habit of locking himself in bathrooms and having conversations with the sink



At some point Patrick stops listing because assembled formally and lined up like this, the facts are becoming kind of too much. Three times Pete asked him: are you a faerie. Three times Pete maybe meant: because I’m one.

So when Pete disappears into the woods without a word to anyone that freezing fucking pre-dawn morning, Patrick can’t say why it feels so urgent that he follow. But that’s just Pete on a Tuesday, isn’t it? For years Patrick hasn’t been able to say why. He’s just tried to look the other way, focus on things that make sense, ignore it.

He has a really, _really_ strong feeling he shouldn’t ignore it this time.

Patrick follows Pete into the woods.

*

Whatever Patrick was expecting to find—Pete in a fairy ring of toadstools communing with woodland creatures via dance, maybe? Pete draped in intestines and ectoplasm, chanting backwards in Latin and spilling his blood onto the snow in an eldritch ritual? Either all-out Disney or straight-up Lovecraft, Patrick really doesn’t know where to start with this whole “I’m a faerie” thing—he doesn’t find it.

He finds an eerie absence instead. The woods are empty.

Deeper and deeper Patrick wends into the scrubby forest, until he’s more than certain he’s covered more ground than this strip of trees can possibly hold. He should have hit backyards by now, row houses and alleys lined with detached garages. There is not a massive, eerie woodland in the middle of Chicago. He would definitely have noticed it before.

Patrick’s feet crunch through the frosted top layer of snow. His heartbeat climbs in his chest, frantic, and there are no footprints for him to follow—no tracks. Did Pete even come this way? Has he already returned to the shoot? Is Patrick the one now lost? But that insistent _wrongness_ pulls at Patrick’s gut, so he follows, follows. He trusts his heart to lead him to Pete—doesn’t it always?

He walks. He walks. He walks. It is cold. He doesn’t know where Pete is; he doesn’t know where _he_ is. Hope gutters. Dread blackens, uncurling in his chest. The air is thick but brittle, not for breathing. Step by step, the warmth of the sunrise fades off his shoulders. His sense of Pete begins to fail.

Exactly one moment after Patrick is taken by a black despair, one heartbeat after his hope is drowned—as if giving up was the prerequisite for discovery—he finds Pete. More accurately: he trips over Pete. Curled in the snow and frozen over with a fine layer of feathered white frost, lips and eyelids blue, face pale like blood never filled Pete’s veins. It’s all very Jack London. It’s all very Hoth. It’s all very Captain America frozen in a block of ice.

Patrick’s chugging brain generates media references, unable to deal with what he’s seeing, staving off the sudden and incongruously burning realization that this is Pete, dead. This is what death looks like, this is what _Pete’s death_ looks like. If Pete hadn’t called anyone from that parking lot. If Pete had cut too deep one of those times he clumsily snuck off to open his own skin like Patrick doesn’t know how to count scars. If Pete had picked a fight with the wrong person, if Pete had followed the wrong pretty emo boy into the parking lot one of those one hundred nights he came back to the bus or apartment bruised, bloody, and/or smelling of sex…

If he walked off into the woods and no one followed him, and he laid down and froze his life away.

This is what Pete would look like.

This is what Pete looks like.

This is Pete, dead.

It is too many ifs—a frenzy of almosts—a panic of still-might-come-trues. Patrick is on his knees in the snow, care for the cold forgotten, clutching Pete’s stiff shoulders, shaking Pete’s frozen form, crying out Pete’s name, trying to kiss warmth back into Pete’s lifeless lips.

It is like kissing a corpse.

Stung, Patrick flies back from Pete’s body. He cannot breathe the frigid air. It chokes him, refusing to enter his lungs.

“You are not dead,” Patrick insists around gasping. His vision is spotty, his heart ticking like it means to explode. “You don’t fucking _dare_ be dead, Pete Wentz! Wake up, wake up, wake _up_!”

Their first kiss in almost four years, and Pete might as well be embalmed in a glass coffin.  Refrigerator-fresh is not how Patrick imagined it would go, if ever their lips met again. What kind of fucked up fairy tale is this, Patrick wants to know, where he can only see the magic once it’s too late? The Pevensies knew they were in Narnia, Harry knew he was at Hogwarts, Snow White was well aware of witches and dwarves, Sleeping Beauty was warned about dragons. It is utter bullshit that Patrick should have been in a fairy tale this whole time and _no one even told him._ He doesn’t know the fucking _rules_. Anyway, aren’t kisses supposed to cure this kind of thing?

The only heat in the whole world is pinned in Patrick’s streaming tears, which make tracks down his face and fall to Pete’s. They leave pink scald marks on Pete’s hoary cheeks, melting through frost wherever they touch. The tiny spotted flushes cast an illusion of life.

This gives Patrick an idea.

He drops back to his knees, leans over Pete, and weeps with abandon—years’ worth of Pete Wentz-related tears he’s stored up and saved as if for this very occasion. There are so many times Pete has broken his heart, on Pete’s own account or on Patrick’s; today, in this forest, Patrick lets himself cry over each shattered, ragged heartbeat. He borrows tears against future sorrows too, mentally reciting all the moments he will never now live, if this frozen _asshole_ won’t wake up.

“Open your eyes, you tragic idiot,” Patrick pleads. “Pete, Pete. Open your eyes. Come back to me.”

Wet and increasingly pink, Pete’s face becomes more recognizable with each tear that falls. He stops looking so much like _dead Pete_ and starts looking just like _Pete._ Patrick’s hands on his iced shoulders leave warm, wet handprints, spreading from the point of contact. Slowly, impossibly, Pete begins to thaw.

Patrick has never been asked to believe in magic. Ten minutes ago he’d have looked at you like you were Pete Wentz if you’d asked him about it. Now he believes in anything that will make Pete’s eyes open again.

“Pete. Baby. Jackass. _Please_ ,” he says. Almost imperceptibly, Pete’s shoulders are slackening, the rigidity shaking out. Patrick will say or do anything in this moment to return Pete to him—and this is a sign, this indicates something, this is a desperation Patrick thought he grew out of years ago, this is something Patrick never asked for, never wanted back, and certainly isn’t fucking ready to look at just now—

But just now might be the only chance he’s got.

“I know what you are,” Patrick says, tears still falling. He’s nowhere near out of things to cry about. “You impossible, difficult creature. Why didn’t you tell me years ago? It would have made so much more sense than trying to understand you as a _human_. I spent so many years trying not to love you—pretending not to—hoping to convince anyone I didn’t so I could believe it myself, when probably everyone in the world could see—and just fuck it, absolutely _fuck it_ , because if this is what trying not to love you gets me then I’ve got nothing left to lose—”

Through Pete’s frozen lips, words mumble out. “I love you, Patrick Stump,” he says, deep in his death.

Patrick is speechless. Relief, joy, anger, ecstasy all tangle together in their rush to be felt.

Then Pete’s eyes open.

Only—Patrick’s pretty new to magic, but—he doesn’t think Pete’s there.

*

Patrick wakes up furious. His head is throbbing so intensely the world pulses; he considers vomiting. This seems unlikely to improve matters, so he puts a pin in it and takes stock of his situation.

Where is he?

It’s hard to say. Somewhere dark and damp, with a floor of—Patrick shifts his face along the floor, one of the only parts of his body he can move, an alarming observation he files away to be addressed later—yes, a floor of dirt. A murder basement, then? Some kind of cavern?

Okay. Taking stock of his body. Is he wounded? Is there pain? Why won’t his limbs move?

Wriggling suggests that Patrick’s feet and hands are bound behind his back with some kind of fibrous, spiky material. It does not stretch or slacken, but friction against it burns. There is a rotten green smell. He rolls a few times, scanning for injury. His throbbing head and rope-scuffed wrists are the only points of pain.

Next question. What is that sound? Is it—breathing?

Oh, god.

Patrick doesn’t think he’s alone.

He jackknifes in his restraints, thrashing and rocking himself onto his back. The room he’s in is so dark, he can’t make out the ceiling. He can’t make out anything, let alone any source of ominous fucking _breathing_. Roots—he thinks there are roots dangling above him. (Unless they’re some more terrifying thing, like monster tentacles or actual intestines. In the air, he smells only damp and dirt. Probably not offal, then.) If they are roots, is he still in the forest? Is he underground? Patrick feels warm, like he’s indoors. Of course, that could be the hypothermia setting in.

Final question: how did he get here?

The last thing Patrick remembers is Pete’s eyes opening, and his strange conviction that it wasn’t Pete looking out. He remembers Pete stiffly, painfully rising to his feet. Somehow, there was a sword in Pete’s right hand, so massive that it scraped the ground as it hung at his side. He remembers Pete raising the sword as if he was fighting against it, the memory unspooling in slow motion. _What are you doing_ , he’d wanted to ask. _Where did that sword come from_. Famous last words. Then, inevitably: he remembers Pete bringing the pommel of the sword crashing down on his head. Falling, Patrick had time to think _You put my head in such a flurry, flurry_ , an absurd thought for an absurd moment.

He does not remember hitting the ground.

“Patrick?” a voice croaks in the darkness. Andy—it’s Andy. “Joe’s here, he won’t wake up. His head feels wet—I think he’s bleeding. Patrick, are you in here too?”

Patrick answers with a groan as he wrenches himself into a sitting position. He thought he was doing okay at core work, but _apparently_ not. Thanks for nothing, P90X. He makes the executive decision to survive this first and worry about toning later. His brain keeps doing this: lapsing into glib chatter, a flippant narration that makes this all seem less real, less terrifying, less impossible to cope with.

Pushing with his bound feet, Patrick scoot-hops across the dirt floor on his ass, making for Andy’s voice with little to no dignity. At least it’s dark in the murder hole; no one will see that he is spending what are probably the last moments of his life with dirt on his ass.

“Did Pete _kidnap_ us?” Patrick asks, voice ragged with the effort of humping his body across the rough floor. He bumps up into a warm body that does not move: Joe, so much dead weight. Having no other tools for contact comfort, Patrick leans over Joe’s slumped form til his forehead bumps what feels like Andy’s shoulder on the other side.

“I’m not sure that was Pete,” says Andy. His voice is tight with worry. He presses back hard against Patrick’s touch. He is frightened: they both are. The clammy weight of Andy against his forehead makes the pounding of Patrick’s hurt head dull.

“Have you ever noticed anything… strange about him?” Even in the dark, even in such strange, dire circumstances, Patrick hedges. He finds he doesn’t want to come out and just say the words. He feels a sudden pang for Pete, for what it must have been like all these years of _not saying it_. Knowing how preposterous, how stupid, how dishonest it would sound, even while everyone around you begged you to fucking explain yourself for once.

“You mean like, knocking Joe out with a sword, incapacitating our photo crew, tying me up and putting a bag over my head, and throwing us all in the back of a van?”

“No, like… before that.”

“Sometimes, on stage, I think he floats.” Andy says it so plainly Patrick is startled. He’d thought he was the only one collecting Pete-phenomena. He’d thought he was the only one who noticed. He’s been so wrapped up in his own tangled feelings for and history with Pete, it’s like he forgot he doesn’t have sole rights. Other people experience him too.

“I think he’s a fairy.” Inspired by Andy’s forthrightness, Patrick just… says it. It is such a relief, letting go of this secret he’s only carried for a week or so. Suddenly he wants very much for Pete to say the words to him, properly and on purpose. He wants Pete to have the opportunity to be honest, true blue, and feel that relief.

They have to get Pete back, first. They have to rescue themselves from this fucked-up murder grotto. They have to get Joe, who is breathing shallowly and bleeding deeply, some medical attention. They have to go find their sword-wielding fairy-tale hostage-taking bassist and save his life, which Patrick knows they can do because they’ve done it before. He doesn’t know what the threat is, yet, but it’s huge and it’s urgent and he knows like dirt floors, bound hands, and pitch darkness that it’s real.

Everything is at stake.

“That actually makes more sense,” says Andy, “than Pete _not_ being a fairy. C’mon—let’s get back to back—see if we can’t get each others’ hands free.”

Patrick takes a final moment to appreciate how straightforward and pragmatic Andy Hurley can be. There is no one he’d rather talk about magic with. There is no one he’d rather be kidnapped with. Then he resumes dragging his ass through the dirt, scraping and scooting over to Andy, and they get to work.

Patrick’s barely managed to loosen the vinelike bonds around Andy’s wrists before the far wall thunders apart, tearing open and flooding the room with blinding light. For a moment he thinks the world has torn open: then he realizes it’s a door, a tremendous stone door that opens onto a world beyond this grim grave.

If there’s a door. If that door is now open. Patrick has one more question.

Who opened it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like "let me, let me trash your love" is the most accurate thing I can ever say. Um, thank you for letting me fuck you up? Come back next week for terrible tasks, cruel commands, and scintillating suspense. <3


	21. With Every Breath I Wish Your Body Will Be Broken Again

Pete is in the throne room. It’s like a dream, or a memory, or watching events unfold from the bottom of a pool no one seems to notice you’re drowning in.

He’s here because Eloissine said _bring them to me_. He’s on his knees because Eloissine said _kneel_. He’s biting his own tongue, half-choking on blood that’s got nowhere to go but down his throat because Eloissine said _shut your mouth_.

He’s doing this and nothing more, because Eloissine said _cooperate_.

He doesn’t know where his friends are. Pete brought them here. He brought them to her, and all she had to do was _ask_. He fought as hard as he could to resist, clinging with all his might to the chant “I am mine, I am my own,” but he wasn’t and he’s not and he knows this because _he_ _brought them here._

He clubbed Patrick, beautiful golden porcelain pale Patrick, over the head. He knocked Patrick unconscious and watched him bleed in the snow and helpless, fighting against his body with each slow, jerking movement, dragged Patrick back to the site of the shoot. The crew rushed to him, asked _what happened, oh god, is he okay_ , and Pete touched each of them on the forehead, one by one sending them to sleep.

Joe came up behind him: he wasn’t expecting that. As much as fatherhood has softened his edges, Pete is still not real great at people coming up behind him. He hit Joe much harder than he meant to, with much more force than he needed to, even with Eloissine’s enchantment thick on him. Joe cried out and the cry was cut horribly short. Pete caught him with the crosspiece, the jagged burning edge of which slashed open Joe’s head. The enchantment didn’t allow him to do much more than pack the wound with snow and bind it with the flannel from around his waist. He tried to be gentle, bundling Joe into the back of the van, or as gentle as he could be while resisting every millimeter of movement. The last Pete saw, Joe was still breathing, but he was terribly unconscious, terribly pale.

After that he didn’t dare knock out Andy. Eloissine had not specifically indicated that they had to be unconscious, just bound. If Pete were forced to, he would admit he was knocking them out for his own sake: so he wouldn’t have to fight them, so he wouldn’t have to open his mouth and be perpetually unable to explain, so he wouldn’t have to endure the weight of their eyes while he betrayed them. Pete tied up Andy and knotted a jacket over his head, blinding him. He was stowed into the back of the van, too.

And then, fighting himself, trying to swerve off at every exit as if the Queen’s thrall might waver or lapse, he brought them here.

He brought them here.

His friends were taken from him as soon as he arrived. He was stripped of his sword while the broken-mouthed kid who threatened him outside Starbucks poked a bone dagger into the soft skin of Patrick’s throat. He was led into the throne room at swordpoint. He doesn’t know where his friends are. He doesn’t know what Eloissine means to do.

All he knows is that he can’t do it. He can’t allow himself to act out the culmination of his worst fears. He will not.

Unless Eloissine tells him to.

Then he will.

“I confess I am surprised,” she’s saying now, her voice drawling out pleasantly as if she’s commenting on a picnic spread. Her amusement and pleasure is thick and choking in the air. “I thought you’d want your third task, changeling. I thought you were in ever such a hurry to be free.” As an afterthought, she adds, “You may speak.”

Pete’s mouth opens, blood spilling out of it and onto his knees, onto the floor. It turns into sticky, silvered scarlet mud where it hits the earth, like the blood of so many before him. Pete wonders, in the distant background of his thrashing panic, how much of his own blood has soaked this floor over the years. It has been a long time since he first knelt here, begging Eloissine to take him into her service. It has been a long time since he knelt here begging her to release him.

It has been longer than his memory goes since he lived here. Since he was hers in truth.

“I am my own,” Pete says. He can’t tell if he’s lying, if after all this time he’s finally learned the trick of it, or if what he’s saying is true in the same breath that Eloissine renders it false. “I am not yours. I don’t want to play any more games.”

Eloissine smirks behind her hand like this is exactly what she wanted him to say. “Punch yourself in the face,” she says smoothly, “as hard as you can.”

Pete’s right hook doesn’t hesitate. Pain erupts, a concussive blast of blinding red bursting outwards from his right eye, splintering down through his cheekbone with freezing force. Pain melts so wetly he thinks for a moment his eyeball has broken open like a water balloon. Then his vision clarifies: the starburst of red he’s seeing is blood, his own reliable filigreed blood. He’s cut his brow with his own knuckle. Adrenaline dumps into his bloodstreams half a hitched breath later, choking off the flood of hurt inflaming his face and just beginning to register in his shellshocked fist.

The only reason Pete doesn’t fall over is because she hasn’t said he can. He’s to stay on his knees until she says otherwise.

He dry-heaves for an undignified moment. He’d puke if he could, all over her fucking floor: but all that comes out of his mouth is blood and spit. He looks up at Eloissine, the Queen he’s bound his life to, and speaks to be heard above the throbbing in his own head.

He says, “I am _not yours_.”

Eloissine purses her lips. The smirk is forgotten. Fluidly, she gets to her feet and takes up pacing before him, gripping her wrists behind her face. “Peter. Stubborn, stubborn boy. That can be true. Only one task stands between you and your freedom. Unless you complete it, you are mine to command.”

Pete doesn’t plan on saying it. Pete never does. But the words come, heated and tearing: “ _I stopped being yours when you gave me away._ ”

That stops Eloissine’s pacing.

The shine coming off her armor, the tiny curls of smoke rising from her burning skin: she captures the candlelight, reflects it back brighter. She amplifies the light in the room, and the shadows too. Her head tips to one side prettily, her eyes—her eyes that glow exactly the way Pete’s eyes do—narrow.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Pete’s voice is savage, his throat torn from all the screams he hasn’t been able to open his mouth for, his throat thick from his own blood and bile. He is on his knees and he is _shaking_ with the effort he is expending, trying to stand. “In the blink of an eye, I bored you. You traded me in for a human child with a fairer face. I begged you to take me into your service, do you remember that?”

Impossibly, one of his feet jerks up, planting on the floor. Down on one knee, a parody of a proposal, he goes on, “As soon as I saw you—for what I thought was the first time—I wanted you to want me. To take me in. I saw you, and you were beautiful and terrible, and I felt like I _belonged_.” Pete laughs, a hollow sound, as if to illustrate the humor of the situation.

“I stopped being yours the day you covered me in glamor and left me in a stranger’s home. It’s just taken me—” Pete grunts with effort, his knee rising from the earth—“too many fucking years—” Pete is rising, straightening his leg, wrenching his floating foot down towards the throne room floor—“to realize it.”

Pete is standing. _Kneel_ , said Eloissine; and here Pete stands.

“Stop talking. Don’t move.” Her words whip around him like ropes, like binding vines. He is sweating and nauseous from the effort of breaking that one command, of covering two feet of vertical, forbidden distance. Her thrall over him did not drop away all at once. A pretty speech and a symbolic gesture were not enough.

He’s going to have to get through this one on brute force.

Well. There’s a reason, maybe, he was born with battle in his blood. Maybe it was for this battle.

He wrestles with his own lips, his own tongue. It is a feeling like being smothered, being choked, like drowning. Before he can so much as part them, Eloissine speaks her next command.

This one isn’t for him.

She orders Nassara, the punk-ass kid  from Starbucks, and a kitsune knight Pete’s never trusted, “Fetch the prisoners. My son needs to learn where his loyalties lie. Blood will teach him.”

Pete curses himself for a fucking fool that he dared forget, even for a second, that his life is never the only thing at stake.

*

They bring in Andy, Patrick, Joe. Joe’s still unconscious. Pete can smell more than see the trickle of red still spilling from Joe’s head.

It makes things easier, in a way. Having them there.

It makes the path clearer.

“If you don’t want the task, Pete Wentz, you are mine to keep. What shall I do with you?” Eloissine says it girlishly, laying one long finger along her chin, a pantomime of musing. She knows exactly what she’ll do with him. Her voice slams shut, severe as steel, and she spits: “Oh, I know. You will kill them, one by one, because you _are_ mine. Let’s start with… the one who’s kindest to you. Cut off his hand.”

Pete’s sword hand jerks towards the blade that Nassara offers out to him, her face black with an unreadable scowl. It’s automatic. He has no choice after all. Mechanically, his brain summons the image of his kindest friend, of Andy, and shows like a diagram the steps Pete will take; the swing of the sword; the spurting blood; the howl of anguish; Andy’s torn face, ruined form.

No: Pete does have a choice. Pete has this one fucking choice. “Wait.” If he finishes the tasks, if he is free: that is the only way he won’t have to follow this order. His hand closing around the offered knife, his voice weary, Pete says, “I accept the third task.”

Eloissine is so delighted, she crows.

It’s a trap. Pete knows it’s a trap. It doesn’t matter. How many years has she spent planning this?  How long has this Rube Goldberg torture device been poised, quivering deadly, over his life? Just waiting for him to stumble into its jaws. All this time he thought she was throwing up barriers to his tasks, pulling the strings to help him fail—now he sees it’s all been building to this.

It is a game she wishes to be playing. That’s the only reason she ever allowed it. Pete was never meant to win his freedom, was never meant to be able to. He’s only meant to amuse her while he thrashes hopelessly along.

She was never going to allow him to win.

Eloissine thinks he’s a changeling, thinks he’s her property and her blood, thinks he’s as predictable and incapable of surprising her as all her other subjects. Her play to consolidate power depends on it.

What she doesn’t know (Pete hopes) is the same thing it’s taken Pete all these years to realize: he’s a faerie and a human too.  He has a heart. He has _choices_. (Pete hopes.)

“I accept the third task,” he says, and he says it like he’s been defeated. Wicked pleasure fills the Queen’s immortal face. Is Pete imagining it, or does he notice signs of _age_ , the first touch of the frost of time, on that preternaturally striking countenance? _Weakness_. Could Eloissine at last be showing weakness?

Pete scans her assembled Court. They are drunk and cruel and merry. This is high entertainment for Unseelie fae. Her courtiers are dressed in their ghoulish best, watching with rapt interest, impatient for the bloodflow to begin. Pete has battled for their pleasure often enough that they know it’s only a matter of time. He makes a good gladiator, an even better spurting blood fountain.

A trio of musicians renders a song just recognizable as _Dance, Dance_ in a grating, horror-cabaret style. It’s a nice touch, a nice little flair of fuck you. The barely perceptible wrongness of the creaky, sawing sound fills Pete’s mouth with the taste of rust, makes his teeth feel filmy. There is no sign that any other members of the court find the music even remotely unsettling. Several of them bob along, as if the assorted hits of Fall Out Boy covered in the key of nightmares are regular listening in Eloissine’s hall. For all Pete knows, maybe they are. He hasn’t been home in a long time. This hasn’t been home in a long time.

The knights—Pete’s peers, once, before he took up the daily practice of oathbreaking—are decked out in finery too, their scarred and stained armor newly ornamented with sharp, whorling iron thorns. The filigree reflects the torchlight, giving the impression of laughter. Pete’s own armor, which has gone unworn ever since he got his heart back, would stand out now—a mismatch. The message is clear.

Pete also notices the level of attendance and revelry far outpaces a typical morning in Eloissine’s throne room. Unseelie fae are not generally morning people. This was a planned event, then. He wonders why she waited so long to spring the trap, if she had access to ensnaring dream-magic all along. But as soon as Pete thinks it, he knows: she waited til it would hurt the most. She wants her heir back body and soul, to demonstrate to the greedy spying Courts how strong she is. She wants to destroy Pete utterly. That’s what she’s wanted, ever since he stupidly announced he loved another: to own him again.

The only way an Unseelie knows to keep something is to break it so completely it can’t go anywhere else.

Pete is startled by the thought. This is the opposite of the way he has tried to love Patrick, Bronx, even Ashlee. He has always let them go when his touch would inflict damage. He has never even once tried to hurt or own someone with his love.

Heartened, Pete directs his eyes at last towards his friends—the ones his love _has_ hurt, regardless of his intentions. They are hurt. He’s hurt them. There is no way to erase or deny it.

Patrick and Andy are on their feet, arrayed around Joe. Andy stands facing Pete, Eloissine, and her well-armed battalion of fairy tale monsters in thorny armor. His fists are clenched in their bonds and he breathes open-mouthed, fast and shallow. He looks furious and fearsome, his serious face made severe by his creased brow and white-lipped frown. Pete’s gaze keeps sliding away from Andy’s eyes. _Cowardice is a luxury you do not deserve_ , Pete tells himself. _Meet his eyes_ , Pete orders, as if he can put a geas on himself. This is the way of obedience he has learned, isn’t it? But cruelty serves only one end. In this last moment, he wants to meet Andy with… kindness. With humanity. Pete tells himself, _He deserves to see your face, before he dies._

Pete lifts his head and looks full on into Andy’s eyes.

The blade is still in Pete’s hand—the blade he was commanded to cut Andy’s hand off with. Andy looks back at Pete with cold disgust, knowing him for a traitor.

Oh, but he wouldn’t be Pete Wentz if he could ever explain himself.

Pete looks at Joe next, pale and unconscious. The sight rips at his heart, the damn thing good for nothing so much as absorbing blows. But looking at a friend who cannot look back is too easy.

He looks at Patrick last. Patrick crouches over Joe, high color in his cheeks, eyes darting around the room with unadorned fear. His hands are free, and he uses them to cradle Joe’s slack head. It makes sense to be afraid, Pete thinks. Yet Patrick does not look _surprised_ —there is recognition on his face instead. _Patrick knows_. Oaths and stars: how long has Patrick known? Has he been _expecting_ this?

With effort, Pete forces himself to meet Patrick’s eyes. Patrick’s gaze is soft and unwavering. Impossibly, Patrick’s mouth curves as he looks back at Pete, shaping the tiniest smile.

Pete cannot possibly deserve it, but the smile strikes him like a piercing arrow of sunlight anyway. His heartbeat quickens. His head feels clearer. This is his strength. This is his own personal magic. If Patrick Stump, kidnapped and bound on brink of death, can smile at him, Pete Wentz can do anything.

Pete takes all of this in in the space of a moment, the space of a breath. He is fortified by what he’s seen, by what those sights tell him. Whatever the task is, whatever the trap is, he’ll do it: he must.

Lifted up, filled by this tiny smile, stung and swelling with narrow hope, Pete says, “I accept the third task.”

Eloissine is also surveying the room, taking stock. Pete thinks he detects the slightest waver in her walk, as if crossing the room is more effortful than she wants anyone to know. A lie without lying: Pete knows how to spot them.

“Very well,” she says primly. “Stay your hand, changeling. I will give you your task first; you can kill them after.”

Pete’s whole body locks up in anger as Eloissine stops before Patrick, surveying him up and down with a look that suggests she is not impressed. She drags her hand along his shoulder, down his chest, and rubs her fingers together as if he’s left grime upon her.

“This is the one, then? This is the boy you love more than me?” The Queen cuts her eyes over to Pete and adds, “Don’t lie.” No one has ever felt the need to give him that command before.

“Why are you asking questions you already know the answer to? Does it please you, to be spurned for a mortal in front of your whole court? Does the humiliation serve you?” As he speaks, Pete pretends for just a moment that what he’s been told, what he remembers, is not a trick, is somehow the truth.

For an inhale, he believes he was born of the faerie before him, that he is a prince with nobility and power flowing through his veins.  For an exhale, he imagines he has power here, power by right of blood. It makes his voice stronger, his words cooler. Even the faceless blob of horror that sits beside Eloissine’s throne orients its body mass towards him, listening.

Before Eloissine can muster her outrage and reply, Pete answers the question posed to him. “Yes. He’s the one.”

Her lips curl, sneering. “And do you love him still? Because I have known your loyalty to be fickle—to wane with the seasons, fade with the years.”

“I have belonged to Patrick Stump,” Pete says, speaking the full truth at last, at last, “since the first time I heard him sing. I will love him with all of my life.”

Eloissine shudders and, Pete maybe imagines, grows paler—as if the very words drain her strength. He is sure of it now: somehow, her power is dwindling.

“You belong to _me_ ,” she says, a brittle snap to her usually distant, imperious voice, “until the task is done.” Her hand tightens on Patrick’s shoulder, gauntleted fingers bearing into his flesh. “You will kill them when I command it.”

“It would be more amusing, Your Majesty,” a new voice interjects, “if you gave him the final task first.” Pete’s eyes fly to the source of the voice: it’s the punk-ass Starbucks knight. If it was Nassara, maybe Pete would feel grateful for the intervention. Because it’s this fucking kid, this worst of every possible Pete stitched up in skin, Pete’s pretty sure things are about to get worse.

Eloissine releases Patrick, who has gone bloodless pale under her touch. She walks over to Pete slowly, with a deliberateness that seems less elegant than wary of stumbling. It is unlike her, to stalk about the throne room with her agitation worn on the outside. Usually she reclines like a cat, without nary a care in the world save who to torture and bleed next, and orders her lackeys to antagonize Pete. Usually she can’t even be bothered to deliver the cruelty herself.

Something’s up. For the first time Pete considers that there’s more at stake here than just his freedom, than his friends’ lives. Eloissine seems… unwell. Eloissine seems _mad_.

“Very well,” Eloissine says. She raises her gauntlet to stroke Pete’s cheek. The metal is cool for an instant, before it begins to burn. “Be still,” she whispers before he can flinch away.

Pete is still.

“For your third task,” she says, smoothing a burn onto his other cheek careful and slow and tossing her other hand lazily in Patrick’s direction, “keep him like your oath.”

The jaws of the trap slam shut.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> how about that task, guys. how about that. no one saw this coming, no one knows the words to uma thurman, everyone is blown away
> 
> I definitely forgot to update this last night, I AM SORRY, I am the worst! ONLY TWO CHAPTERS LEFT AFTER THIS!
> 
> Tune in next week for... self-sacrifice, stabby stabbing, and irresistible commands. Thank each and every one of you for reading, I have had such an amazing time with this story and this fandom.


	22. Til Tonight Do Us Part

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the first but not the last time, because I haven't said it before: this story is made possible by the lovely [immoral_crow](http://archiveofourown.org/users/immoral_crow/pseuds/immoral_crow) and would not flow so well without her. Also, my heart would be, like, SO much emptier. She's the only beta I've ever had and I can say for sure she's the best one!
> 
> So someone sweet told me, very prettily, that the last chapter was visceral and violent. This one is more so. I'm a fainter and it doesn't bother me--it kind of delights me, because I think it's rendered well There's only a bit of gore, but it *is* gore. Be warned, ye who enter here!

The knife is in Pete’s hand. Eloissine is less than an arm’s length away. The glamour on Pete’s cheek is beginning to blacken and peel away beneath her insistent metal touch.

He wants to eviscerate her. Wholly, truly. Never before has he wished her dead—never before has he been able to fully hate her, not without some love mixed in—but oh, he hates her now.

He could kill her now.

Only, he can’t.

That’s the point, that’s the final task. It’s an ouroboros. Keep Patrick like his oath. If he breaks his oath to Eloissine by disobeying, by trying to cause her harm, he’ll fail the task and be kept in her service. If he _keeps_ Patrick, he must keep his oath too, or he’ll fail the task; but if he keeps his oath, Eloissine owns him, Eloissine forces him to kill the friends who have been his only home.

It’s an impressive, impossible trick. She’s worded it such that he can only have Patrick while Eloissine has Pete. She’s worded it such that he’s bound more surely than he was by oath alone—now Patrick’s life is tied up in the balance. Patrick’s heart. She’s tightened her grip. She’s made sure Pete will never be free.

As long as she owns him, Pete poses a danger to everyone and everything that he loves.

Though she’s forbidden it, Pete stumbles backwards, just a step out of reach of the searing. Pete’s glamoured skin flaps off his cheeks gruesomely; for only the second time in his memory, he feels air brush his true face beneath. These tiny acts of defiance cost him so dearly his body sags on his bones, like he’s an empty suit on a hanger rather than a man, and affect her not at all. He will not be able to resist a big command; slowing its execution is all he can manage. And that’s before he tires himself out.

“You have wandered long enough,” says the Queen. “It’s time you shed your false skin and came home to rule beside me. Kill them,” she adds, an offhand afterthought. “I’ve suffered enough of your distractions.”

If he kills Patrick, it’s possible his oath will break. (It’s possible the world will break.) If he kills Patrick, his oath won’t matter. Nothing will matter ever again, if he kills Patrick. He won’t be Pete anymore. Everything _Pete_ that is inside of him will die the moment Patrick does, and he’ll see to it the empty, leftover body is soon to follow. His heart will blink out of existence and he will fall down dead. They will die with one breath, in one instant: together.

To kill Patrick differs from dying only in that it is worse.

Pete knows this. Pete fights the command with every bit of himself, with all the steel and strength and resolve he’s ever possessed, with the sense of agency and personhood and choice he’s battled so brutally to uncover. He scrapes the barrel, fighting.

Pete lurches towards his friends anyway. Knife in hand. It would be quicker if they let him use his sword. He’s glad he doesn’t have his sword. With a knife, he’ll have to get up so close—maybe they will stop him. With a knife, the kill will go slow— _please, please, they have to stop him_.

“Pete, don’t listen to her. Stop!” Andy cries, the whites of his eyes huge and desperate. Andy’s hands are behind his back. He can’t even use them to slow the blade.

“I—can’t,” Pete bites out, and then with a sweeping blow of his empty hand, he knocks Andy out of his path. He’s thinking—what is he thinking? Maybe if he can slow his bespelled limbs down enough, Andy will have time to get away. To run, to hide from Pete forever—because unless Eloissine says _stop_ , Pete will be hunting him for just as long. For forever.

Pete stares helplessly at Patrick, a murmuring Joe-width away. (Joe stirs, close to waking. Pete would be relieved if this didn’t just mean Pete has to kill him all over again.)

“ _Kill_ him,” Eloissine spits. “Bring me the heart of the one you love more than me.”

Pete advances in spite of every screaming internal protest. Eloissine is bending the full force of her will and magic to this command. She’s wanted this for a long, long time. Pete can tell by the precision of the trap, by how hard she’s worked to ensnare him, by the size of the audience she’s invited to attend.

She’s not letting Patrick out of here alive. She’s not letting any of them out alive.

Pete knows what he must do.  The only thing he can do. This is his choice, the choice he was made for. The only choice that matters. The choice he’s spent these last few years learning the hard away about responsibility and self-determination to make.

“Til tonight do us part,” he says softly to Patrick. They are close now. Pete’s voice is thick with his tears, his horror, his regret.

“Pete, _no_ ,” pleads Patrick as Pete’s knife soars into the air.

“You have to kill me,” Pete hisses as it comes crashing back down, hilt first, into Patrick’s open hand.

For a moment, their hands overlap. Their skins touch. Pete feels wholeness, warmth. Then Patrick’s hand closes around the knife and Pete lets it go.

Pete’s eyes flutter closed, each tendon in his body and thread of his being snarled in furious, quaking resistance of Eloissine’s command. All of this buys him one heartbeat of stillness, of beneficence. He closes his eyes, for this cause born to die, and exhales.

Whole-hearted and at least half human, Pete greets his death.

*

_Oh, fuck this_ , thinks Patrick, staring dumbly at the serrated knife Pete has pressed into his hand. Its teeth are made for sawing bone. Pete stands before him with a look of total absolution, utter serenity on his face. His eyes are closed, his hands open at his sides. Patrick imagines he can see Pete’s heart shining gold, beaming light out of his chest.

Of one thing Patrick is completely certain: he’s not going to kill Pete Wentz. Sure, he’s thought about it; Pete can be singularly obnoxious. But absolutely the last thing Patrick is going to do in the moment Pete Wentz has finally been able to say _I love you_ is put a literal fucking knife in his chest.

Patrick leans forward, takes the time to brush the quickest, lightest of kisses to Pete’s waiting lips, in case it’s his only chance. Then he drops to the earth, paring apart the vines that bind his ankles with a sweep of the knife. As he breaks away from Pete, from this first-last kiss, his awareness zooms out to what’s happening around them.

Andy and a tall, black knight are grappling, boot and fist and blade, with five other fearsome knights. Patrick is only a little surprised to see Andy with a sword: after all, Patrick’s gotten a knife somehow, and he’s generally a pretty nonviolent person. The alliance is more surprising—but then, Patrick knows better than most what it is to love Pete, to be willing to fight with all your heart for whatever’s best for him. If this random faerie knight loves Pete too, Patrick gets it. Patrick is here with a knife in his hands doing the exact same thing, and Patrick _gets_ it.

The other faeries, monsters, and impossible creatures in the room all look like sharp, warlike people, yet they spectate unmoved. They are enjoying the entertainment, Patrick realizes, with the air of those accustomed to others battling and dying for their pleasure. They are also, he thinks, waiting to see who’s winning before they get involved.

If he stabbed this wicked faerie queen right now, Patrick doesn’t think they’d stop him.

Andy is no trained fighter, impressively muscled as he’s become. The lady knight is hopelessly outnumbered. Pete, too, might unfreeze and start fighting at any moment—he is sweaty and shaking with his efforts to resist, but Patrick sees the queen has some kind of hold over him.

All this is to say: if Patrick is going to act, he has to act fast.

So Patrick acts fast.

He shoves Pete in the chest, just as a pre-emptive maneuver, and leaps over Joe. (Poor Joe. But there’s no time for that.) Patrick launches himself at the metal-clad queen. He hits her bodily and they both fall to the ground. The barbs of her armor pierce his skin. Patrick’s not really thinking, there isn’t time, but to the extent he has a thought it’s _Pete can’t kill her but I can_.

It’s not automatic. It’s by no means a reflex. But it is surprisingly easy to raise the knife and bring it down again. He knows without needing to be told, can _feel_ in his blood like it’s pumped by Pete’s heart, that this woman is responsible for the scars, the nightmares, the suffering. That she will kill them all, if he lets her.

There is so little time to stop her.

She opens her lips, draws breath to incant a spell or scream an order to her curiously onlooking subjects, and Patrick will not let her. Pete will, Pete has, done anything for him. Here, now, in this moment, Patrick is ready to do the same.

The breath she draws does not make it past her throat, because Patrick cuts it open. Breath and blood both burst from the wound, as if only barely held in by her translucent skin. Her eyes, her eyes that blaze to match Pete’s, widen with rage and disbelief and the certainty of death. She raises her long-fingered hands to her throat, where smoking blood rushes over and between her gauntlets. For a terrible moment, the yawning flesh at the furthest edges of the wound begins to knit together again—then there’s a great gout of black blood and it tears so wide her head falls back limp, the tendons that supported her neck severed.

Her chest works like a bellows for a few moments longer, trying to suck in air with nothing. All the while her heart empties itself.  It beats her body hollow.

Quicker than you’d think, it is over. It is dead.

Patrick is slick and wet and red with royal blood.

Somehow, he rises to his feet. His gore-soaked, dripping fist is still clenched around the knife, the blade of which swirls silver-red like Damascus steel from faerie blood.

The first time he tries to say the words, no sound comes out. Blood drips over his lips and onto his tongue. He swallows automatically, not meaning to.

The second time his words hit the air. “Stop,” he commands shakily. “Stop fighting.”

Dull and far away, the battling knights cease. They unhand blades and step back from each other, neat and orderly as fencing students. Andy’s ally, the black knight, nods her blood-slicked head at one of her combatants as he pulls her dagger out of his side and offers it back to her, hilt-first. She is clutching a wound of her own, a gash in her chest that is so large as to be utterly incongruous with a woman still standing.

Andy, thank fuck still standing, has his hands choked desperate around the hilt of Pete’s enormous sword. His eyes flick from foe to foe, waiting for the next assault. He is bruised and bleeding from at least three places Patrick can see; sensibly, he does not seem to believe the battle is over.

Somehow, Patrick knows it is.

Even Pete has gone still, a look of total, aching relief on his face. He is kneeling over Joe with someone else’s spiked maul in his fist, hovering a few deadly feet from Joe’s slack face. Pete’s arm tremors with the effort of resisting gravity.

Patrick struggles to hold back the wild laugh surging in his chest. Alive, alive. Joe and Andy were right all this time: Pete’s no good for Patrick.

Patrick’s right too, though. He cannot find it in his heart to regret even a moment he’s spent loving Pete.

Jarring and out of place, the sound of applause raises the hair on the back of Patrick’s neck. He spins to face the sound, gripping the knife all the tighter. He carefully does not look at the queen’s body, nor at the spreading burgundy stain it has made. He has made.

A decrepit man, a thousand years too ancient to be called _old_ , looking more like mummified remains than anything living, has risen from a grand chair beside the throne. With his knotted, withered hands, he is _clapping_.

Dust wheeze out along with his words as the old man creaks, “The Queen is dead. Long live Patrick Stump, King of the Unseelie Fae.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DID
> 
> YOU
> 
> LIKE
> 
> IT
> 
> I am dying to hear!!!!
> 
> Okay, you guys get a choice. I have the last chapter ready to go. Would you like me to post it this weekend, or do you want more time to draw out the terrible suspense? <3


	23. May Nothing But Death Do Us Part

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it, darlings. This is the last one. I cannot without crying express how wonderful and fun and uplifting and magical and _connecting_ this story has been for me. It was in every sense a journey. I relish the friends I have met through Peterick and I will be back to delight you with some fluffier things soon. Thanks for taking a chance on a brutal ending with me. You have seen me through, and I feel so cared for. Please, let's keep talking. You are why I'm here. I have been welcomed with open arms by this fandom and I never want to belong anywhere else. I feel very Pete Wentz about you.  <3 <3 <3

Patrick has blood dripping from his eyelids, slicking his lips. He has silver-red in his hair, on his cheeks, soaking his chest where he caught the brunt of the spray. His shirt is pretty well ruined. Ruined like her throat.

Open, empty. A raw red wormhole leading nowhere. Arteries, esophagus: tunnels to nothing. Wet, she is wet, she is dripping. She is hollow too.

Patrick is redder than sunrise.

Patrick is red ruin.

The oldest man in Faerie creaks and groans towards Patrick, Eloissine’s twisted crown outstretched in his snarled hands. He means to place the crown upon Patrick’s slick brow.

Pete could not have killed her. Her careful wording, the third task, made sure of it; his fealty, his magic binding, ensured it too. There was no way out, with Eloissine alive. His oath would have bound him to her service, to her whim, forever. It was only a matter of moments, of breaths, til she forced him to kill all he loved. That is why he asked Patrick to kill him. Death was the only thing that could save his friends, and he was powerless to cause Eloissine’s, and so he chose his own—

And now. Now, here is Patrick, slick and dripping with so much blood. Here is Pete, alive.

Here is Pete, free from his service, his oath honored til the end—his oath fulfilled. Here is Pete, free to keep Patrick exactly as he kept his oath: wholly, with both halves of his heart, with each artery, every valve, the aorta entire.

It is so nearly everything Pete has ever wanted, it’s almost indistinguishable.

Here is Patrick, so soaked in gore he’s dripping on the floor.

Here is Pete, alive and free.

Here is a nightmare horror, approaching with cruelty shaped into a crown. Meaning to place it on Patrick’s forehead, as if Patrick, blood-red, is not marked plainly enough already.

Pete moves quickly. He uses the maul he’s still holding to smash the crown out of the oldest man’s hands. The man cries out, recoiling from the blow, but Pete was precise. He crushed nothing but twisted bark of the crown. It is very important Pete does not ask himself whose skin it was, before it shaped her crown.

“You will _not_ place that upon him,” Pete growls into his expressionless, creased paper face. “He does not accept the crown or the title or the power or the realm. He is no one’s king. He is his _own_.”

A hand settles on Pete’s elbow, so lightly he doesn’t feel it at first, not until it squeezes.

Spattered in Eloissine’s life, the hand is small and warm and somehow horrible. It is Patrick’s. It is the first time Pete’s skin has ever crawled in response to Patrick’s touch.

“It _is_ my crown,” Patrick says. He stoops down and picks up the loathly thing. Solemnly, he sets it on his own brow. “I do accept it. I’m a king of Faerie now.”

The blaze of hope Pete felt, the sense of rightness and the satisfaction of completion he felt when he pressed a knife into Patrick’s hand and asked for death—that is gone now. His heart gutters. His chest aches empty. “Patrick, no,” he says. “You don’t have to—you can’t—”

Patrick looks down at his bloody self, as if noticing for the first time that he looks like Carrie’s prom, like he’s been sloshed with a bucket of innards and guts and permanent deeds.

He’s wearing a woman’s life. Immortality comes with blood—so much blood. Patrick is wearing it all.

“I can,” Patrick says softly. “Aren’t I dirty enough yet? Aren’t I filthy enough for you to see me?” Patrick wipes at the blood on his face with his hand, smearing it cheek to chin, pressing a thumbprint of it to his own forehead. He looks down at his hand, shining, then holds it out to Pete, showing him the blood as if Pete can’t see it. “I am not something that needs saving. Not from you, not by you. I _killed_ her, Pete. I’m the one who saved _you_. I earned that throne. I want it.”

“ _Patrick_.” Pete is discovering whole new ways to feel helpless. He doesn’t know how to turn aside what Patrick’s saying but he can’t accept it either. Pete has blood on his own chin, blood streaming from his own eye. He hates to think they _match_.

“I want to be part of your world. All your worlds.”

“I know someone.” Pete blurts it out, abruptly entering the bargaining phase of grief. “Some nice Seelie New Yorkers, looking to expand their territory. They will take the throne. You don’t have to.”

Pete is startled and a little proud to learn about himself that, even with Patrick on the line, there are some things he won’t do: he won’t offer to take the throne himself. By blood, maybe, if not by death, it could be his. Blood lineage does not count for much among the fae; coups are the usual method of succession. Still, he has a claim. He could make it.

He thinks of Bronx. He thinks of himself. He thinks of a life spent trying to escape, first to escape his human life and then to escape his fae one.

He does not make the claim.

“I said I want this,” Patrick says. The gentleness of his voice is hard to reconcile with the blood on his face. “I want to do this. Let me try.”

“They’re cruel.”

“I can be cruel.”

“Not like this. You don’t—you can’t possibly understand. Patrick, they’ll tear you apart. They’ll _kill_ you!”

Patrick holds Pete’s gaze. His face is still and serene. His eyes are filled with absolute trust. He shrugs off the most urgent and deadly of Pete’s protestations easily, saying only: “You won’t let them. You never have.”

Pete’s brain scrambles, trying to produce another objection. Before he can, Nassara and Andy approach like a three-legged beast. Her hand is clamped to a wound on her chest. Pete can’t see how deep it is, flesh obscured by dark armor; but Patrick is not the only one wet with blood. Blackness seeps between her fingers. She leans hard on Andy. They have, evidently, formed a brotherhood in the trenches. Andy has his arms around her, helping her stay upright. At least Andy appears hale and whole. Whole-ish. Plus or minus a few minor holes.

Patrick takes advantage of Pete’s temporary ceasefire. Squeezing his small hand on Pete’s arm again, he calls out to the assembled fae, “Who here is skilled at healing? My friend needs aid. It would be wise to curry favor with your new king.” Patrick’s voice carries, captured by the attentive air. The gold in it thrums fully in Eloissine’s hallowed hall, like Patrick’s inherent magic is reflected and magnified by the years of enchantment seeped into the earth and air here.

It suits him. Orchid and amaranth, it _suits_ him.

There are takers, from the crowd. Pete, paranoid and panicking, tries to scan them—tries to identify whether they’re the trustworthy sort of evil, reliable enough at healing that they might help. They all saw clear enough what happened when Eloissine, Unseelie to her core, tried to use magic for health instead of hurt. It severed her fucking neck.

Patrick directs volunteers over to Joe, a stern and blazing look on his face. In a low, dangerous voice, he demands true names and outlines the consequences of treachery. The hunchbacked, wizened form of the oldest man hobbles to his elbow, his cragged scowl adding legitimacy and weight to Patrick’s suddenly kingly aspect. Pete has never known the old man’s function, but Pete always got the sense that he’d sat at the side of the monarch since time immemorial. Now he stands at Patrick’s.

Nassara interrupts Pete’s eavesdropping. Wheezing from the effort of crossing the room or from her wound or both, she says, “Don’t undermine him in front of all and sundry, whelp. Hold your tongue.”

“I can’t let him—”

“You can,” Andy interrupts. Pete stares at him in naked disbelief. Serious, sensible Andy. If fucking Andrew Hurley doesn’t have his back on this, on this emergent issue of blood-soaked, obviously traumatized Patrick _assuming leadership of a faerie realm he has never before visited and cannot possibly understand_ , then the whole world has gone fucking crazy.

“I didn’t even hit you on the head, so I can’t fucking imagine what your excuse is for thinking this is a good idea,” Pete says.

Andy gives him a look that says _reminding me of how you kidnapped me earlier is not the quickest way into my good graces._ Out loud he says, “Trust someone other than you to decide what’s good for them for once, Pete. Trust Patrick to decide.”

Maybe he reads Pete’s mind, because then he adds, “Remember that he chose you, once, and I looked at him like he had a head injury too. Remember that I tried to talk him out of it and almost lost his friendship for it. He knows what he wants. He knows what he can do. We all know how stubborn he is. Just… trust him.”

This is really, really, _really_ not how Pete imagined it would go, when his friends learned the truth about him. When his friends found out about Faerie.

Nassara, all the while with her life gushing away through her fingers, rasps, “If it’s not him, there’s a bloodbath over the territory and you’ll both be killed to eliminate the threat of your claims. You know this. Besides: think of what he might do. The snatched babes sent home again, the curses undone, the lives spared.”

Pete only has one argument left. He names that quality he has always envied, desired, held so sacred: “He’s human.”

“He’s plainly more than that,” says Nassara. “He’s got the Sight, to start—or did you think a drop of your spit was worth near ten years’ true-seeing? It is not for you to know what else he’s capable of.”

Patrick returns, a small, cramped, peach-feathered adarna hopping after him. It stares down its beak at Pete, as if it’s used to fielding rude questions about its size and capabilities. Pete can see at once why Patrick took a liking to it.

“Cherno y Bas is willing to heal your wound, sir knight,” Patrick makes the introduction. “It did quite well with our friend Joe.” Pete expects her to bristle at the insult—he’s never known Nassara to tolerate the clumsy healing attempts of Unseelie fae—but she sinks to the ground willingly. Andy helps lower her onto her back. The bird hops onto her chest, tasting her blood thoughtfully and cocking its head to one side as if considering its next course of action. She’s hurt worse than Pete thought.

Pete watches fixedly to avoid looking at Patrick. The rapt attention has broken up around them, as if the event was officially concluded not by Eloissine’s death (and Pete has not even yet begun to process that) or by Patrick’s sudden coronation but by his first action as their King. The show is over, apparently: Unseelie fae dissipate, returning to their poisonous, private pursuits.

Without Pete ever agreeing to it, somehow it’s all over. Somehow the die is cast.

Somehow, Patrick is king.

Patrick’s sticky fingers lift Pete’s chin. His blood-spattered face is drawn with concern, as if Pete is the one anyone should be worried about right now. Pete is the most rational being in this room. They’ve all lost their fucking minds.

“Joe is all right,” says Patrick. “You didn’t kill or hurt anyone.”

Pete just looks at him. Is Patrick deliberately trying to emphasize his brand new status as a person who has committed murder? That he can casually shoulder the horror Pete has fled from for years? Always, Pete thought this—the blood, the body count—would be what cost him Patrick. Patrick clad in a mantle of guilty, gritty heartsblood is nearly more than he can bear. How, _how_ does Patrick always find a way to make Pete love him more?

The words tumble out of Pete. His fear and exhaustion and utter fucking inability to comprehend this series of events have worn him down. His filter is gone. There is no reason not to speak with utmost honesty, now. “I fought so hard and so long to keep you from getting tangled up in this world. I don’t _want_ you to have to be cruel. I don’t want you to turn into one of them.”

“To turn into you, you mean.” Patrick says it with so much certainty, so much accuracy, that it makes Pete flinch.

Pete’s eyes burn with unspilled tears. “You can’t—you cannot give up so much for me, Patrick. You can’t risk your life, kill someone, become a king of Faerie, pretend you’re a kid in a Narnia story and there are no stakes too terrible to bear. Not for me. I’ve been hiding myself from you since the day we met. You don’t know what I’ve done, what I am.”

 “I get to make choices too, Pete.” Patrick keeps trying to catch Pete’s eye. Pete can’t, won’t. Bile is burning in his throat to match the tears burning in his eyes to match the silver blood staining Patrick’s skin, the twisted crown burning on Patrick’s brow.

“You’ve never even seen my real face,” Pete whispers.

“Show me, then.” He says it so tenderly that Pete meets his eyes at last. Ringed in red, they look so blue.

Pete decides to pretend it’s that easy. He hooks his magic under the flaps Eloissine tore in his glamour. For the second time in his life, he slips his own skin. It is not a tearing, this time: Pete is more skilled at the finer points of magic than he was in 2009. Instead of destroying the glamour, he smooths it off his skin, slides it gently away into the ether. He lets Patrick see his plain, honest face, a face even Pete has only seen once before.

Patrick’s lips part around a tiny gasp. No matter how strange the day has been, Pete’s true skin is hard to prepare for. Patrick’s fingertips graze Pete’s coarse cheeks. “It’s still you,” he says, voice touched by wonder, scanning Pete’s skin and anchoring onto Pete’s amber eyes. “You’re always you. Does it even need to be said? You’re the song stuck in my head, the only song I’ve ever loved. I’ll always want you.”

“I’m a changeling. There was a real Pete Wentz, a human boy. I stole his life.”

“And you’ll love me with all of it?”

“What?”

“Your stolen life. Like you told her. You’ll spend it loving me?”

“Yes,” Pete says helplessly. “Of course. But—”

“This once, let it be easy for us,” Patrick says, and silences any further protests with his kiss. Pete’s sorrow and hurt and loss all pours out of his mouth, transmuting into a desperate passion, alchemized like lead into gold. It is like their first kiss and their last kiss and a kiss they’ve never had before all in one.

It is easy. It is easy as breathing.

The kiss does not break so much as pause, as if it is the beginning of a kiss they will return to again and again for all of their days. Patrick brushes his vow into Pete’s lips. “May nothing but death do us part.”

Helpless, happy, heart surging in his chest, Pete says back, “Long live the King.”

*

Pete’s in a fairy tale and now everyone knows it. Now they’re in it, too.

Patrick wears a crown, issues orders, accepts offerings, and oversees midnight revels on the weekends. Joe’s been seeing a Seelie healer about his back and charms to keep fae far away from Ruby’s crib. Andy’s added sparring with Patrick’s six sworn knights to his usual CrossFit regime. If he continues at this rate, he’ll be one of Patrick’s finest fighters within the year—mortality gives you an edge. Pete’s sage warrior advice is this: if you must fight, forget smart. Fight desperate. Maybe Andy will swear himself into Patrick’s septet, taking Pete’s old place. A human knight for a human king—has even Faerie seen stranger things?

Patrick writes music with the sirens and encantados of his court; they have never used GarageBand before, are delighted by the concept of remixes. On tour, sometimes they sleep in hotels and sometimes they sleep in Faerie knowes, wined and dined by courts curious about the new human king of Unseelie and his rumored kindness. They build alliances. Patrick’s reign grows strong. Patrick hires Nassara for security; they all feel better having her at shows, especially with all the rowdy fae kids in their crowd these days. She’s a good babysitter, too. Bronx is crazy about her.

It is utterly unlike the hundred thousand worst case scenarios Pete imagined over the years.

Everything is different without anything having to change.

Well, there is this change: Pete and Patrick, Patrick and Pete. There is no reason anymore that they shouldn’t belong to each other. So they do.

This morning Pete is enjoying one of his favorite sights: Patrick and Bronx at the small, perpetually sticky table of their Boys of Zummer bus, watching cartoons on a tablet and sharing cereal. Currently, they are bargaining over marshmallows.

“I want the rainbows,” Bronx is saying.

“By the power of random distribution, we both get rainbows. That’s the beauty of Lucky Charms.”

“No, I want _all_ the rainbows.”

Patrick gives Bronx a measured look, then upends the entire cereal box. Pete covers his mouth with his hand to hide his grin. As the responsible adult in this situation, it’s his job to frown sternly at these antics.

“If you get the rainbows, what do I get?”

“Cereal pieces.”

“We both know those are gross. I want pots of gold. _And_ clovers.” A relatively short time among the fae has really polished Patrick’s knack for bartering.

“Pots of gold and hearts. I get clovers,” Bronx counters.

Pete watches the two people he loves most in the world sort through marshmallows on a Tuesday morning. Tonight, they’ll play a thrumming, full-hearted show in one of his favorite cities, and tomorrow they’ll set their compass point for Chicago and drive through the night to get back home. He is fuller of goodness, wholeness, and health than he can hold. Than he ever knew could exist. Pete spills over, streaming light.

Things have devolved from an organized trade agreement to a marshmallow-scarfing, cereal-hucking skirmish when Patrick catches Pete watching them. He lobs a handful of rainbows in Bronx’s direction (they scatter far beyond the tiny kitchen—no matter how old they get, Pete and Patrick’s bus is _always_ filthy) and surrenders.

Patrick crosses the narrow bus and fixes his hands to Pete’s waist. He beams golden, close enough to kiss, close enough to keep. “You ready to swear fealty yet?” he teases. “It’s been over a year. Aren’t your fingers itching for your sword?”

“Not mine anymore,” Pete says, sneaking a kiss onto Patrick’s forehead, hitting the spot usually hidden by his omnipresent hat. Grey beanie, trucker hat, fedora with a bark crown on its brim—seasons change but people don’t. Pete remanded his sword into the keeping of the Unseelie king—into the keeping of Patrick—to be given to his replacement on the same day Eloissine died, freeing him from his oath. Pete’s not a knight anymore. He’ll never go to war again.

It is his choice.

“You’re usually so keen to swear oaths. How can I be assured of your loyalty?”

“Do I not kneel for you enough, Stump?” Pete murmurs. He is gratified by the flush that flares on Patrick’s cheeks as Patrick darts a worried look over at Bronx. Bronx is sugared-up, marshmallow-frantic, and totally oblivious to anything beyond his dad and dad’s boyfriend having a gross, cootie-filled moment. Besides which, Pete hasn’t done such a poor job of parenting that his six year old can identify blowjob innuendo. “I’m through with knighthood,” Pete adds, pressing his lips to Patrick’s ear, “but there are other ways I can serve.”

Patrick shivers against Pete’s chest and nips his neck, pulling back. “Tell me we have a babysitter tonight,” he groans, “so I can have my kingly way with you.”

“You know you can just command Nassara,” Pete reminds him. “Or any of your subjects. You don’t have to _ask_.”

“I can just _command_ Ser Nassara? Do you hear yourself, madman?” Patrick squeezes Pete’s hand and heads back to the breakfast table laughing. “Here, you demonstrate for me. Give her an order and let me know how she takes it.”

“Point,” Pete acknowledges.  He scrapes up a handful of table-cereal and fills himself a bowl. At least they haven’t started bargaining over the milk yet. Pete leans down to kiss the top of Bronx’s head, affection his son ducks under, and sits down to eat.

Every goddamned day is a miracle.

 

 

 

_end_


End file.
